Week 8 - by Lee Chen Yau

In week 8, lecturer teach us about requirement. Requirements is 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. For instances, some people will think that teenager girl is around 17-20 and some people might not. Of course, we will get various of answer based on different people. Thus, requirements must know how to tell when they have been fulfilled.

Types of Requirements

Functional requirements, Data requirements, Environmental requirements, User characteristics, User goals and user experience goals are the requirements of Interaction Design.

Functional Requirements:

Capture what the product should do.

Data Requirements:

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. Besides, there are 4 characteristics of environmental requirements.

- Physical Environmental

- Social Environmental

- Organisational Environmental

- Technical Environmental

User characteristics:

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 which is the user's performance.

User experience goal:

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

Data Gathering for Requirements:

There are difference type of data 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. There are 4 main principles of contextual inquiry.

(i) Context: Emphasize on going to workplace and seeing what happens.

(ii) Partnership: Developer and user should collaborate in understanding  the work.

(iii) Interpretation: Observations must be interpreted in order to be used in the design and the interpretation should be in cooperation between user and developer.

(iv) 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:

a) Scenarios

b) Uses cases

c) Essential use cases

d) Task analysis

Reference:

Lecturer's notes