Summary
and Context of Use
Summary
and Context of Use
This document is the second edition of a collection of methods and approaches (together loosely called practices) for user-based requirements analysis produced by the RESPECT project. The objective is to produce a comprehensive list of user-based requirements specification practices which have been adopted by industry and which are therefore likely to be of practical benefit to the Human Computer Interaction (HCI) specialist in this area.
Part of the task of the HCI specialist is to manage the end-user input to the design process. We assume that in this task the HCI specialist is a manager and a facilitator, not a representative or spokesperson for the users or, worse still, an interface between opposing world-views. Essential to his or her expertise is a knowledge of a wide range of methods and approaches that can be pressed into service in different contexts as required.
We assume furthermore that the HCI specialist is going to be working in an inter-disciplinary team consisting of software designers, graphics artists, interface design specialists, marketing personnel and so on, and that he or she may well have multiple roles within this design team.
Three classes of readers are targeted by the current document:
The document is divided into two unequal parts and an appendix.
The first fairly brief part defines the concept of user-based requirements engineering and compares the software engineering view of user involvement in the requirements specification process with the human centred view of how users should be involved. A terminological distinction is made between methods, which are recipes for conducting successful requirements activities with users; and approaches or techniques in need of specific instantiations in order to be of practical use. This is of course more of a continuum than a dichotomy.
In the second part, a list of methods and approaches to facilitate user-based requirements engineering is given, organised under headings corresponding to the three main stages of the user centred model:
These three stages are more of a spiral process than a waterfall one. The model which co-ordinates progress through these stages is not the concern of the present document: this is worked out and made explicit in the 'RESPECT User Requirements Framework Handbook' emerging from Work Package 5 of the RESPECT project, with which the current document will be ultimately merged.
In the appendix to this document is a classification of the user-based requirements methods and approaches by applicability to three groups of users with special needs: the aged, the young, and the physically handicapped. This has been developed as a result of the review of an earlier draft of the current document by the special needs task force in RESPECT.
At an early stage in the gestation of this document we thought this would be the right place to give an account of how requirements engineering from an HCI perspective differs from the activity as seen from a software engineering perspective. Several editions later, we realise that this is a problem of a different kind to that of cataloguing practices, and we have identified a new task within RESPECT and will produce a special report which will be concerned only with this topic later in 1997.
More information about the European Usability Service Centres network can be obtained from URLs mentioned on the RESPECT project web site or by contacting the project manager, Dr Nigel Bevan (n.bevan@npl.co.uk).