Identifying User Needs and

Establishing Requirements.
Interaction Design, Chapter 7

Tempe Kraus
Yongjie Zheng

October 30, 2007

 Outline

• What are we trying to achieve?

– Identifying needs and establishing requirements
– Categories of requirements

• Data gathering techniques

– Choosing between data gathering techniques
– Data gathering guidelines

• Data interpretation and analysis

• Task description and analysis

– Scenarios, use cases, essential use cases and task analysis

• Summary

• Additional References

2
 In the beginning... What are we trying to achieve?

• Identifying needs:
– Understand as much as possible about the users, as well as their work and the context of their
work.
– System under development should support users in achieving their goals.

• Identifying needs is crucial to our next step.

• Establishing requirements:
– Building upon the needs identified, produce a set of requirements.

• A user-centered approached to development:

– Study that investigated the causes of IT project failure found that “requirements definition” was
the most frequently cited project stage that caused failure.
– Understanding what the product should do and making sure it meets the stakeholders’ needs are
absolutely critical to the success of the product.

3
 What are requirements?

• A requirement is a statement that specifies what an intended product should do, or

how it should perform.

• Traditionally, two types of requirements:

– Functional requirements specify what the system should do.
– Non-Functional requirements specify what constraints there are on the system or its
development.

• Interaction design requires us to understand both the functionality required and the
constraints for development or operation of the product.

• Let’s refine these two broad types into further categories.

4
 Categories of requirements

Category Description

• Functional requirements • What the product should do.

• Data requirements • The type, volatility, size/amount, persistence,

accuracy and value of the amounts of the
required data.

• Environmental requirements • Or “context of use” – circumstances in which the

interactive product must operate.

• User requirements • Characteristics of the intended user group.

• Usability requirements • The usability goals and associated measures.

Source: Interaction Design, ch. 7

5
 Data gathering

Overview of data gathering techniques used in the requirements activity

Technique Good for Kind of data Advantages Disadvantages

Design is crucial and

Answering specific Quantitative and Can reach many people response rate may be
Questionnaires
questions qualitative data with low resource low. Responses may
not be useful.
Interviewer can guide
Time consuming.
Some quantitative interviewee if necessary.
Artificial environment
Interviews Exploring issues but mostly qualitative Encourages contact
may intimidate
data between developers and
interviewee.
users.
Highlights areas of
Some quantitative consensus and conflict.
Focus groups Collecting multiple Possibility of dominant
but mostly qualitative Encourages contact
and workshops viewpoints characters
data between developers and
users.
Understanding Observing actual work Very time consuming.
Naturalistic
context of user Qualitative gives insights that other Huge amounts of
observation
activity techniques can’t give data.
Learning about Day-to-day working
Studying procedures, No time commitment will differ from
Quantitative
documentation regulations and from users required documented
standards procedures

Source: Interaction Design, ch. 7

6
 Choosing between data gathering techniques

• Your choice is influenced by a number of factors.

• The kind of information you want.

– May also change depending on the stage of the project.

• The resources available to you.

– E.g., your project may not have the time, money or personnel to send out a nationwide survey.

• The location and accessibility of stakeholders.

– You may want to run a workshop for a large group of stakeholders, but could be prohibited by
geography.

7
 Choosing between data gathering techniques, continued

• Two main issues to consider when making your choice:

– The nature of the data gathering technique itself.
– The task which is to be studied.

• Data gathering techniques differ in the following:

– The amount of time they take, level of detail and risk associated with the findings.
– The knowledge the analyst must have about basic cognitive processes.

• Tasks can be classified along three scales:

– Is the task a set of sequential steps or is it a rapidly overlapping series of subtasks?
– Does the task involve high information content with complex visual displays, or low information
content, where simple signals are enough to alert the user?
– Is the task intended to be performed by a laymen with minimal training, or a practitioner highly
skilled in the task domain?

• Example: the design of an ATM vs. the design of a system to support back-room
workers at a bank who are reconciling the machine register with the customers’
deposit slip.

8
 Basic data gathering guidelines

• Focus on identifying the stakeholders’ needs.

• Involve all the stakeholder groups.

• Involve more than one representative from each stakeholder group.

• Use a combination of data gathering techniques.

• Support the data-gathering sessions with suitable props.

• Run a pilot session if possible, to work out any kinks.

• Understand what you are really looking for (though compromise may be needed).

• Carefully consider the means used to record the data during a face-to-face data
gathering session.

9
 Data interpretation and analysis

• Once you have gathered your data, you will need to interpret and analyze it.
– Start interpretation and analysis as soon after the gathering session as possible.

• Interpreting data:
– Begin structuring and recording descriptions of requirements.
– Capture information in documents and diagrams.
– This helps to keep track of context and usage information during the rest of the process.

• Analyzing data:
– Data-flow diagrams, state charts, work-flow charts, etc.
– For object-oriented approaches, can use class diagrams, sequence diagrams, etc.

• Requirements activity iterates numerous times before stable requirements evolve.

– Continued interpretation and analysis throughout the process will result in a deeper
understanding as well as clarification of the requirements.

• We will focus on four techniques that have a user-centered focus and are intended to
understand the users’ goals and tasks.

10
 Task description and analysis

• User-centered task descriptions are created to understand users’ goals and tasks.
– Scenarios
– Use cases
– Essential use cases
– Task analysis

• Methodology for each:

– Description
– Advantages
– Limitations
– How to develop

• Example:
– The shared calendar application

• System-centered descriptions are used to communicate precise information with

developers.

11
 Task description and analysis, continued

Scenarios

Describes human activities or tasks in a story that allows

Description exploration and discussion of contexts, needs, and
requirements.

Telling a story is a natural way for people to explain what

they are doing or how to achieve something. It also allows
Advantages
us to identify the stakeholders and the products involved in
the activity.

More focused on task characteristics than the detail of

Limitations
interface design and layout. [2]

To Develop Focus on what users are trying to achieve.

12
 Task description and analysis, continued

• Scenarios: the shared calendar example

Source: Interaction Design, ch. 7

13
 Task description and analysis, continued

Use Cases

The main emphasis is on user-system interaction, but also

Description
user goals.

It is easy to grasp key features in the user-system

Advantages
interaction activities.

Traditional use cases contain certain assumptions, including

Limitations that there is a piece of technology to interact with, and the
kind of interaction to be designed.

Identify the actors, then examine these actors and identify

To Develop
their goal or goals in using the system.

14
 Task description and analysis, continued

• Use cases: the shared calendar example

1. The user chooses the option to arrange a meeting

2. The system prompts user for the names of attendees
3. The user types in a list of names
4. The system checks that the list is valid
5. The system prompts the user for meeting constraints
6. The user types in meeting constraints
7. The system searches the calendars for a date that satisfies the constraints
8. The system displays a list of potential dates
9. The user chooses one of the dates
10. The system writes the meeting into the calendar
11. The system emails all the meeting participants informing them for the appointment

Alternative courses:

5. If the list of people is invalid

5.1 The system displays an error message
5.2 The system returns to step 2
8. If no potential dates are found
8.1 The system displays a suitable message
8.2 The system returns to step 5

Source: Interaction Design, ch. 7

15
 Task description and analysis, continued

Essential Use Cases

A structured narrative consisting of three parts: a name

that expresses the overall user intention, a stepped
Description
description of user actions, and a stepped description of
system responsibilities.

Represents a more general case than a scenario embodies,

Advantages
and tries to avoid the assumptions of a traditional use case.

Difficult to capture concrete and specific activities while

Limitations
maintaining the generality required.

Identify user roles, then examine these roles and identify

To Develop
the users’ goal or goals in using the system.

16
 Task description and analysis, continued

• Essential use cases: the shared calendar example

Source: Interaction Design, ch. 7

17
 Task description and analysis, continued

Task Analysis

Used to analyze the underlying rationale and purpose of

what people are doing: what are they trying to achieve,
Description
why are they trying to achieve it, and how are they going
about it, e.g. Hierarchical Task Analysis (HTA) & GOMS.

Task analysis establishes a foundation of existing practices

Advantages
on which to build new requirements or to design new tasks.

In the hands of inexperienced practitioners, too much level

of detail may be entered into; for systems with diffuse
Limitations
objectives, time may be wasted by attempting to apply task
analysis to intractable material. [2]

Break a task down into subtasks and then into sub-subtasks

To Develop
and so on.

18
 Task description and analysis, continued

• Task analysis: the shared calendar example (1 – text form)

Source: Interaction Design, ch. 7

19
 Task description and analysis, continued

• Task analysis: the shared calendar example (2 – diagram form)

Source: Interaction Design, ch. 7

20
 Task description and analysis, continued

• Developers-centered descriptions: more formal, more specialized [4]

– Entity-Relationship diagrams

– Class diagrams

– Ontologies

– Goals

– Finite State Machines

21
 Summary

• “Getting the requirements right is crucial to the success of the interactive product.”

• There are different types of requirements:

– Functional, data, environmental, user and usability.
– Every system will have requirements under each of these headings.

• Most commonly used data-gathering techniques for establishing requirements include:

– Questionnaires, interviews, workshops or focus groups, naturalistic observation, and studying
documentation.

• Describing user tasks such as scenarios, use cases and essential use cases can help to
articulate existing user work practices.
– They also help to express envisioned use for new devices.

• Task analysis techniques help to investigate an existing situation, i.e. existing systems
and current practices.

22
 Additional References

1. Sommerville, Ian; Software Engineering, Sixth Edition; Addison-Wesley, Boston, MA

(2000).

2. Scenario Building, http://www.ucc.ie/hfrg/projects/respect/urmethods/scenario.htm

3. Schneiderman, Ben and Plaisant, Catherine; Designing the User Interface, Fourth
Edition; Addison-Wesley, Boston, MA (2005).

4. van Vliet, Hans; Software Engineering: Principles and Practice, First Edition; John
Wiley & Sons, Ltd (2000).

23
24