week 8 - Yau Fen Nie

REQUIREMENTS

Types of Requirements

Functional requirements

Data requirements

Environmental requirements

User characteristics

User goals

user experience goals

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 Requirements;

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.

User Goals - effectiveness, efficiency, safety, utility, learnability, and tracking which is the user's performance.

User experience goals -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.

-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:

- Scenarios - Uses cases - Essential use cases - Task analysis -