UCD

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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Market Research and User Research

Market Research Vs. User Research

January 10, 2018 Design

I have often had conversations with clients and designers who have a difference of opinion on the virtues of ‘market research’ and ‘user research’, sometimes even using the terms interchangeably. In one such recent interaction with a marketing executive from a large Canadian company with whom I was associating for a consulting project, I was told that ‘user research’ was not necessary for the current circumstances since his company was perfectly cognizant of its customer base. He was referring to the marketing research his team was involved with, and rightly so. In all this, I believed, his goal was to expedite product development by paring down the number of hours and the expenditure required for the user research phase. It should come as no surprise for designers and managers, that a large chunk of their product design commitment relies on a comprehensive overview of the customer base gained from research studies at different times, and any form of research which could serve various purposes during a product’s development journey.

[perfectpullquote align=”right” bordertop=”false” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]An ardent proponent of the UCD methodology, I firmly believe in the potential of research data in gathering an informed opinion about the motivations of the actual users which would enable me in developing a product’s design strategy, this includes presiding over focus group sessions, moderating personal interviews, or conducting a contextual inquiry study.[/perfectpullquote]

The user research exercise is not just relevant to the current state of the product analysis, but as the audience evolves and the product begins to feel redundant, the overlapping data from the market research and user research becomes that much more critical in the product’s design goals. Incidentally, some experts believe in the difference between market research and marketing research though I would like to set aside that debate for now. Instead, the question which I aim to examine in my article deals directly with the significance of market research and user research from the context of a product’s development lifecycle.

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