UX Process: Requirements & Goals

May 23, 2012 by

UX Process: A Paper PrototypeThe UX process can greatly vary from team to team. User experience design (UX), interaction design (IxD), user interface (UI) design, and other web/application design professionals often craft their own UX process for planning and creating a successful, user-centered design.

User-centered design puts the user’s own goals and enjoyment ahead of business goals and personal assumptions.

Requirements Gathering: The First Step in the UX Process

The requirements gathering phase is the first step of the UX design process. During the requirements gathering phase you and your UX team will spend time determining the needs for a new or altered product design. This usually involves answering the following two questions:

  1. What does it need to do?
  2. How will we measure success?

Keep It Simple

Your answers don’t need to be overly complex. They can be brief and informal. Don’t be afraid to adjust and tweak your answers during the UX process, so long as the core goals are preserved.

Focus on breadth, not depth, and get final sign-off from all departments involved in the product process. Usually this is product management, interaction design, and engineering. It’s also strongly recommended that you get sign-off from executives and other key stakeholders.

Write Them Down!

It’s very important to physically write these answers down so that they are ingrained in your team’s mind throughout the UX process. That will also provide leverage down the road when it comes time to present designs to upper management. If a manager doesn’t like a specific design outcome, you can refer back to the overall goals of the project to explain your motives and reasoning.

Real World Examples

It’s easy to describe the process of writing requirements for a UX design project, but what do they actually look like?

Hopefully this fictional example provides you with some insight:

  1. Strengthen the company’s brand to provide a trustworthy, sophisticated, and memorable experience.
  2. Increase the registration funnel completion by 20% using AB testing against the current design.
  3. Provide users with 1-click access to all major services
  4. The reservations module should allow users to view their current reservations within a 2 second load
  5. Provide quick 1-click access to Live Chat support to minimize frustration and increase customer support quality

Notice that we’ve included measurements into some of our goals — this is a productive way to measure the effectiveness of our design decisions. AB or multivariate testing is often the best way to test out the effectiveness of a design.

Now that you have a solid set of UX design requirements built into your , you can work against them to keep your experience design project productive and on track.

What’s Next?

The next step in the process is to create realistic user personas. Jump to the next article in the series to learn how you can create simple, effective user personas without breaking the bank.

Other UX Process Resources

photo by: v222000
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Discussion

  • Peter

    Sorry Kevin, but the examples you give are badly chosen.

    Let me quickly review them before suggesting better ones.

    1. Strengthen the company’s brand to provide a trustworthy, sophisticated, and memorable experience.
    This is an overal brand experience and should be made more specific to be an effective UX requirements (what does “sophisticated” mean in terms of UX?)
    2. Increase the registration funnel completion by 20% using AB testing against the current design.
    This requirement could also be met by directing higher-qualified leads to the start of the funnel. If you add “20% for existing users” it becomes a UX requirement. The addition of the design/evaluation method (A/B testing) should not be a UX requirement; that’s a decision of the project team (or their management).
    3. Provide users with 1-click access to all major services
    “1-click” is an interface design decision. As Jared Spool said, it’s a matter of designing for “the scent of information” instead of the minimum amount of clicks; if users can “smell” their way to “all major services” and feel good about it, it’s okay.
    4. The reservations module should allow users to view their current reservations within a 2 second load
    If this was rephrased as “the users want to feel their current reservations appeared quickly”, it would be a UX requirement, now it’s a system performance requirement. If it takes the system 10 seconds but the users are (a) given a reasonable explanation or (b) entertained during the process, it might still be okay (user research should be able to discover this). We once removed a “results found in 0.35 seconds” statement because the users, scientific researchers, couldn’t believe our system found the results so fast, and expected it to last longer…
    5. Provide quick 1-click access to Live Chat support to minimize frustration and increase customer support qualityDisregarding the “1-click” statement (see number 3) and the suggestion that 1-click access increases customer support quality(!?), this is *almost* a UX requirement because it hints at user research findings that show that users can get frustrated and don’t want to search for means of support. They may even have expressed a preference for Live Chat over FAQs, peer-2-peer forums, email, and phone.

    My preferred format for UX requirements is: want from .In your case, the 5 might be roughly translated as:
    1. want from .
    2. want from
    3. want from
    4. want from .
    5. want from .

    I hope this helps your audience get a better idea of what UX requirements might look like.

    • http://www.kevinleary.net/ Kevin Leary

      Hi Peter,

      You bring up some great points I hadn’t thought about, and to be honest I agree with most of them and can’t counter an argument.

      Would you be interested in critiquing this article for inclusion on the OpenView Labs website? A sort of Layer Tennis approach for the blog article.

      http://labs.openviewpartners.com/

      We can include a brief bio and link to your portfolio/website, and you would be listed as the author (with a byline mentioning that it was originally written by me).

      • Peter

        Kevin,

        Sure. If you email me directly (peter@peterboersma.com) we can work out the details of the tennis match ;-)