Week 8 / Sixth Lecture : Identifying Needs and Establishing Requirements. [Wenyong]

For this week class, we learned about requirements.

Whats the meaning of requirements?

Requirements are a statement about an intended product that specifies what it should do and how should it perform. It should be as specific, unambiguous, as clear as possible. Requirements must know how to tell when they have been fulfilled. For example , from dictionary , I found that "teenager" refers to a child between 13-19 but some of them do not agree with it. This is based on different people different mind.

Types of Requirements

• Functional requirements
• Data requirements
• Environmental requirements
• User characteristics
• User goals
• User experience goals

Functional Requirement:

• Capture what the product should do.

Data Requirement:

• Capture the type, volatility, size or amount, persistence, accuracy and value of the required data.

Environmental Requirement:
The circumstances in which the interactive product will be expected to operate.

• Physical Environmental
• Social Environmental
• Organisational Environmental
• Technical Environmental

User Characteristics Requirement:
- Capture the key attributes of the intended user group

• User's ability, skills, nationality, educational background, preferences, personal circumstances, physical or mental disabilities.
• The collection of attributes for a 'typical user' is called a user profile.
• Anyone product may have a number of difference user profiles.
• To bring user profiles to life, they are turned into a number of Personas.
• Personas are rich description of typical users of the product under development that the designers can focus on and design the product for. They don't describe real people, but are synthesized from a number of real users who have been involved in data gathering exercised

Usability goals:

• effectiveness, efficiency, safety, utility, learnability, and tracking

User experience goal:

• fun, enjoyable, pleasurable, aesthetically pleasing and motivating which is the user's perception.

Data Gathering for Requirements:

• Interviews
• Focus Groups
• Questionnaires
• Direct observation
• Indirect observation
• Studying documentation
• Researching similar products

Contextual Inquiry:
Contextual inquiry is an approach that follows an apprenticeship model: the designer works as an apprentice to the user. 4 main principles of contextual inquiry :

Context

• Emphasize on going to workplace and seeing what happens.

Partnership

• Developer and user should collaborate in understanding the work.

Interpretation

• Observations must be interpreted in order to be used in the design and the interpretation should be in cooperation between user and developer.

Focus

• Keeping the data gathering focused on your goals

Data Gathering Guidelines for Requirements:

• Focus on identifying the stakeholder's needs
• Involve all the stakeholder groups
• Have more than one representative from each stakeholder group involve
• Support data gathering sessions with suitable props - task descriptions, prototypes

Data Analysis, Interpretation and Presentation:

• Requirement activity is iterated a number of times before a set of stable requirements evolves, the description will expand and clarify.
• 4 techniques that have a user-centered focus and are used to understand user's goals and tasks:

1. Scenarios
2. Uses cases
3. Essential use cases
4. Task analysis

Reference : Lecture's note.