Week 8: Requirement for interactive design by Eyok

Requirements in different field :

In Software engineering, there are functional and non-functional requirements.

Functional requirements : what the system should do (eg. formating, changing font styles etc )
Non-functional requirements : what are the contraints there are on the system and its development ( eg. must be able to run on different platform )

There are a few types of requirement :
Interaction design
1. functional requirements (how the things function)
2. data requirements (how the data to be)
3. environmental requirements
4. user characteristics ( based on user needs)
5. usability goals and user experience goals
6. capture the key attributes of the intended user group
:user's abilites and sklls, nationality, educational background, preferences, personal circumstances, physical or mental disabilities
7. The collection of attributes for a 'typical' user is called a user profile
8. To bring user profile to life, they are turned into a number of Personas ( rich descriptions of typical users of the product)

Usability goals > effectiveness, efficiency, safe, utility, learnability and tracking > user's performance

User experience goals > fun, enjoyable, pleasurable, aesthetically pleasing and motivating, the product is interesting or not > User's perception

Data gathering for requirements :
1. collect sufficient, appropriate data so that stable requirements can be produced
2. need to be expanded, clarified and confirmed intial requirements
3. types :
interviews, (get people to explore issus, semi structured/ unstructured interviews often used to elicit scenarios. Important to meet stakeholders )
focus groups, ( gaining consensus view and highlighting areas of conflict and disagreement during the requirements activity, help stakeholders to meet designers and both express their views in public )
questionnaires, (used for getting initial responses that can be analyzed )
direct observation, ( to understand the nature of the tasks and context in how they are performed)
indirect observation, ( used less often)
studying documentation, ( good for understanding legislation and getting some background information )
researching similiar products ( gain understanding of the kind of features and interaction that other package has to offer )

Contextual inquiry
1. context
2. partnership
3. Interpretation
4. Focus


Data analysis, interpretatiom and presentation
- iterated a number of times before a set of stable requirements evolves - descriptions will expand and clarify 4 techniques :
1. scenarios
2. use cases
3. essential use cases
4. task analysis