CHAPTER 7 – UNDERSTANDING

The focus of the understanding process is on what people do, or might want to do and on any
problems they are having with any system currently in use. It is also about understanding how
people do what they do, so that designers can help develop technologies that make aspects of
everyday life more efficient or more enjoyable.

UNDERSTANDING REQUIREMENTS

 Functional requirements are concerned with:

• What the system should be able to do
• Functional constraints of a system
• Logical and organizational constraints
 Non-functional requirements are concerned with
• The way the functionality operates

PRIORITIZING REQUIREMENTS

Requirements should be reviewed with customers and clients and modified as necessary.
Decisions will almost always be made about the relative priority of the requirements, since
few design projects have unlimited resources. One way of doing this is by using the
MoSCoW rules. These classify requirements into:

• Must have
• Should have
• Could have
• Want to have but Won’t have this time around

PARTICIPATIVE DESIGN

Designers need to remember that the system that they are designing will be used by other people,
not them

They also need to understand the requirements of other people.

By engaging with people in the design process, designers will quire a large number of stories that
form the basis for the analysis work.

See Challenge 7.2

INTERVIEWS

 Structured interviews
• Use questions that are developed before hand
  Semi-structured interviews
• Use pre-prepared questions but can reword the questions to fit the context of the
interview
 Unstructured interviews
• Used where it is important to minimize designers’ preconceptions
• Where very little background information is available beforehand

QUESTIONNAIRES
Are one way of streamlining the understanding process if a large number of people are to be
surveyed and resources are not available to interview them individually.

Good questionnaires ate time-consuming to construct so that all the items:

 Are understandable
 Are unambiguous
 Collect data which actually answer evaluated questions
 Can easily be analysed

Questionnaire methods:

 Likert scales
• Collects perceptions
• Elicits people’s opinions with a statement using a 5-point scale
 Semantic differentials
• Used to derive bipolar rating scales

See Challenge 7.4

WORKING WITH GROUPS

Focus groups

 A group of people are given questions by facilitators and encouraged to react to each other’s
comments.
 People can be asked to describe how they cooperate to manage activities.
 Members of the group can stimulate each other’s memories and discussion may flow more
naturally than in a single person interview.
 Can be enhanced by the use of scenarios, prototypes and other stimuli.

BRAINSTORMING

 Require an experienced facilitator to conduct a fun and effective session.

 Should start with an ‘anything goes’ approach to generate plenty of ideas which can be
filtered in the discussion when the feasibility of the ideas are inspected.