ux

Requirements Gathering or Requirements Generating?

May 7, 2020 Design

This question hasn’t bothered me more in my career than in recent times after I went through an online UX course. So in UX parlance, what would be considered as a reasonable vocabulary — is it gathering of the requirements or is it generating of the requirements? Designers ought to comprehend user needs and generate feasible ideas for the real world, so clearly, it’s the connotation of the word ‘gathering’ which is at conflict here more than the approach itself.

According to the information given on his website, Joe Natoli is a speaker on topics of User Experience (UX) and Design for 29 years, from national and global conferences, and has launched eight successful online courses. Two of which I happened to reflect upon on Udemy a few weeks ago and both were insightful at the very least. However, it was his differentiation and comparison of requirements gathering versus requirements generating in both the courses that made me unusually inquisitive about the synonymous terms. It’s also purely language semantics at play here as I explain in detail below. But first, this is Joe’s take on the point in question from the UX Strategy Fundamentals course:

I want you to know about requirements up front (which) comes from a very smart lady by the name of Kim Goodwin who said that requirements cannot be gathered. OK this is important because I hear that phrase a lot (and) in the last 26 years I’ve heard it more times than I can count. We’re going to gather requirements which essentially means we’re going to get a bunch of people in a room and they’re going to tell us what they need and we’re going to write them down. We’re gathering from them. OK. It does not work that way. And if it does it’s not going to be successful. As she says there’s no requirements tree back. We’re not going to go pick requirements off the tree or any one of these and this one looks particularly good. I think we’ll do that. It doesn’t work that way. You have to iterate and generate requirements you have to kick them around and decide what’s right what matters what doesn’t matter what can work what isn’t going to work. It’s a process. It’s not an answer. You need to find out what users need to be able to do with your website in terms of functionality in terms of the content that they see and interact with in terms of data if they fill out a form and give you information or they look at reporting where they get data and information.

UX Strategy Fundamentals → Section 4: Determining and Controlling Project Scope – Lecture 17. UX Focused Requirements: An Introduction.
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Happy 64th Birthday, Steve Jobs!

February 24, 2019 Quotes

At Apple, we come at everything asking, ‘How easy is this going to be for the user? How great it is going to be for the user?’ After that, it’s like at Pixar. Everyone in Hollywood says the key to good animated movies is story, story, story. But when it really gets down to it, when the story isn’t working, they will not stop production and spend more money and get the story right. That’s what I see about the software business. Everybody says, ‘Oh, the user is the most important thing’ but nobody else really does it.

CNN Money/Fortune, 21 February 2005

Redefining UX Through Service Design

April 20, 2018 Design

Giving in to my inherent desire for discovering new insights, I stumbled on yet another industry report on UX, this time from Loop11. They have produced an insightful 24-page document about the outlook on UX in 2018, and I wasn’t surprised to see Service Design redefining UX as the methodology for improving the overall customer experience. Consider the following data:

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  • 28% consider UX as referring to all the touch points or experiences a user has with a product, service or interface.
  • 14% simply described UX as the ‘user experience’, sometimes going on to mention contact points or interactions.
  • 13% believe UX refers to the emotions and attitudes a user displays or feels about a product, service or interface.[/perfectpullquote]

The respondents are alluding to an approach to map & improve the “touch points” or services integrated with an overall customer experience strategy. In which, the ‘service’ supports a user’s emotional context of the experience during a product’s lifecycle, but also in enabling a structured framework to redefine those intangible experiences that a customer would likely endure, before, during and after experiencing a product or a service. I have briefly covered this concept on this blog where I have spoken about incorporating a 360° strategic outlook “which includes a product’s physical & environmental aspects besides UI”. As digital transformation brings automation and companies look for social innovation, designers need to broaden their UX mindset by not just embracing the functional aspects but also by connecting with various other fields of activities that would indirectly complement the desirability factors of a product or service.

Service Design is a cross-disciplinary practice which combines numerous skills in design, management, and process engineering, in developing user-centered business models that are empathetic to user needs. In other words, it helps to improve and deliver intangible services aimed at remodeling customer experiences.

Design Thinking For Organizational Innovation

April 10, 2018 Design

An insightful quote from the Innovation by Design book caught my attention at a local bookstore and luckily I was able to find it on the author’s blog through some rigorous Googling. It gains prominence especially since in my experience, some experts have associated with the design thinking (DT) methodology as a UX design activity referring to its iterative design activities. Hence it was important to make a note of its broader value in innovation here.

The criticality of using DT or ‘human-centred’ design in enterprise software development has been documented in an incisive paper by IBM, but the frameworks also stimulate the transformation journey in combining the organization’s strategic vision involving various inter-organizational initiatives as listed below. Essentially, if you are a practising consultant at the intersection of business design & digital IT in your organization and believe that your role is limited to software consulting, you could expand the scale of your engagements and contribute to the maturity of your institution in more than one ways.

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  • The influence of design thinking at scale on the organization’s culture
  • The creation of new products, services and experiences
  • The design organization processes, systems, and structures
  • The creation and leadership of long-term strategy to distributed innovation
  • The functioning of teams, decision-making and conflict resolution
  • The design of collaborative environments
  • The use of external design thinking experts and consultants
  • The training and development of employees in design thinking

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via How to multiply creativity | Lockwood Resource

The Design Experience Dilemma

February 18, 2018 Design

I read an excerpt from Don Norman’s revised classic book on UX ‘The Design of Everyday Things’ that pointed at the cognitive functions of the human brain in the context of good vs bad design experience.

[perfectpullquote align=”right” bordertop=”false” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””] Good design is actually a lot harder to notice than poor design, in part because good designs fit our needs so well that the design is invisible, serving us without drawing attention to itself. Bad design, on the other hand, screams out its inadequacies, making itself very noticeable.   [/perfectpullquote]

When you think about software and “bad” user-interfaces for instance, consistent periods of exposure to a clunky task flow in a working environment per se forces the human brain to adjust to the flawed experience, and the pressure to meet those goals increases the cognitive efforts towards learning those relevant skills quickly despite the experience being unwieldy in gaining familiarity with the UI for accomplishing those recurring tasks. It might be termed as “efficient” but leaves the user in a quagmire. Such onerous yet persisting functionality naturally forms a so-called ‘blind spot’ preventing its users from judging the experience as ‘good’, ‘bad’ or ‘poor’ since they have now settled into a comfort zone in this burdensome journey. In my experience, I have seen its effect leaving a huge mark on their individual productivity, moreover in some cases, it even compels the users to thwart attempts to bring any positive change to the system. This is one reason why design thinking and user-centred frameworks fundamentally emphasize on ‘observing’ the users in their natural surroundings rather than ‘interviewing’ them to test their inherent judgement in relation to the tasks which they undertake. It could be, that in this context, Dr Norman is mentioning the human experience from the point of view of ordinary systems which are unrelated to the hurdles of technology, because the “inadequacies” which stem from a bad UI may not be necessarily perceived by the end-users for the reasons that I mentioned above, and also because they are committed to achieving those goals regardless of the quality of the UI or experience.

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