Course

Effective Period

: User Experience
: September 2016

Project Objectives and

Approach & Requirements
Session 03

Acknowledgement
These slides have been adapted from

A Project Guide to UX Design: for User Experience

Designers in the Field or in The Making, Russ Unger
and Carolyn Chandler, Second Edition,
New Riders. ISBN: 978-0-321-81538-5. Chapter 5.

Smashing UX Design : Foundations for

Designing Online User Experiences, Jesmond
Alen and James Chudley, First Edition, Books
Library. ISBN: 978-0-470-66685-2 Chapter 2, 3

Learning Objectives
LO 2 : Identify and analyse the good UX and methods to
plan, analysis, design and build UX.
LO 3 : Apply design principles to prototyping and design
UX.

Contents

Solidify Project Objectives

Understand the Project Approach
Understand the Current State
Gather Ideas from Stakeholders
Outline Responsibilities
Gather the Right Stakeholders
Create a Plan for the Meetings
Coalescing Requirements

Solidify Project Objectives

Objectives are an important focusing lens that youll use
throughout the project.
The objective for that project should be focused on reaching
and engaging market.
When start a new project, you probably have project
objectives from the projects sponsor (the business
stakeholder who has direct responsibility for the success of
the project).

Fuzzy objectives, ideas, and

needs

Solidify Project Objectives

A clear objective resonates throughout a project. It helps you

Ask the right questions as you gather ideas from business
stakeholders
Plan research with users and focus your analysis of the results
Detail the ideas gathered from stakeholders and users and convert
them into a consolidated list of project requirements
Prioritize those project requirements based on their value to the
company
Create effective interaction designs
Manage requests for changes to the design once development
begins
Focus efforts during deployment activities (such as training and
communications to users about the new site or application before
and during its launch)
Determine whether youve met the needs of the client company,
once the project is launched

Solidify Project Objectives

A solid objective is :
Easy to understand. Avoid insider terminology.

Distinct. Avoid vague statements; instead, use wording

that seems like it will be useful when youre prioritizing
requirements.
Measurable. Make concrete statements that you can set
an independent measurement against to determine your
success.
As you define a fuzzy objective, making it clear and
measurable, it becomes a solid objective that you can base
decisions on.

Understand the Project

Approach
Its important to knowing the overall project approach or
methodology that the project used.

Most approaches involve the same steps:

Plan the overall strategy, approach, and team
structure.
Define the project requirements.
Design interaction and visual concepts and evolve
them into detailed specifications.
Develop, test, and refine the solution.
Deploy the solution via messaging, training, and a
planned launch.
Extend the project by making recommendations for
improvements.

Understand the Project

Approach
How does the approach affect user?
Knowing your approach helps you understand a number of
things:
What questions you should be asking, and when.
Expectations on how project team members will
collaborate and how close that collaboration will be.
The level of detail needed in your documentation and the
level of formality.
Important milestones that involve approval from
stakeholders and deployment to different groups.

Understand the Current State

Its important to understand the current state of the site (if youre
redesigning one that already exists) or by understanding key
competitors more thoroughly (if youre designing a new site or
application).
A way to gain background information and generate ideas that
could become requirements is to conduct a heuristic analysis.
A heuristic analysis can provide a general understanding of the design
quality and help identify any potential design issues.
The process for conducting the heuristic analysis will generally remain
same :
Gather product and project background knowledge.
Choose the heuristics to use.
Walk through prioritized areas of the site, identifying areas where
the heuristics are followed well or missed.
Present your findings to the project team and primary
stakeholders.

Understand the Current State

(cont)
In many waysthe planning of UX projects can become a
design challengein its own right.
UX projects typically consist of three main phases: a research
phase, a design phase and a further research phase, designed
to test and validate the designs :
The research phaseis where you immerse yourself in the
project to get the background youll need to make design
decisions later in the project.
The design phaseis where you work out how what you
are designing will work and how it will fit together.
The validation phaseis where you identify whether what
you came up with in the design phase actually works with
its intended audience.

Understand the Current State

(cont)

Gather Ideas from

Stakeholders
Gathering ideasand coalescing them into requirementscan
take quite a bit of time.
Here are some steps for an efficient process to greather ideas
from stakeholders:
Outline roles and responsibilities. Make sure project team
members understand the roles that they should be filling as
requirements are gathered.
Gather the right stakeholders, in the right groups, to
ensure time is used in the best way during requirementsfocused interviews or meetings.
Create a plan for the meetings, including topics to be
covered and questions to be asked during meetings.
Run the meetings efficiently, capturing ideas and getting
clarification. Investigate ideas to dig down to the needs
behind each one.

Outline Responsibilities
Here are some questions to ask as you determine the specific
responsibilities each team member will shoulder during
requirements gathering:
Who is primarily responsible for gathering and scheduling
the right business stakeholders in the most productive
groups?
Who creates the structure of topics and questions for the
business stakeholder meetings?
Who facilitates the meetings?
Who takes notes, and how are they shared?
Who follows up with whom afterwards?
Will someone from the technology team be present at all
the meetings? If so, how is that person involved (are they
listening, providing input, or something else)?

Gather the Right Stakeholders

The main purpose of interviewing stakeholders is to gain an
understanding of relevant project-related ideas, needs, knowledge,
and frustrations from various points of view, which can then feed
into the project requirements.
Who are possible stakeholders you could involve? These groups are
often good sources for ideas:
Groups with initiatives that depend on the site (for example,
those with marketing campaigns that need to have information
presented on the site)
Groups that need to support the processes directly behind the
site or application, such as providing content, entering and
managing data, and responding immediately to information
gathered
The front line of customer service, such as phone or online
support or anyone who deals with customers face-to-face (for
example, at a retail location or via deliveries)

Gather the Right Stakeholders

(cont)
Sales, product management, or consulting services, to
represent the products and services being presented
Human resources, for meeting recruiting objectives
Public relations, for presenting information to investors
and the media
Any groups responsible for other relationships that need
to be developed as part of the project and that will
influence its design, such as relationships with partners or
vendors

Create a Plan for the

Meetings
Right meeting must be plan :
Who the participants, their roles and responsibilities
when its conduct, how long the objectives

Source : Russ Unger(2012), chapter

5

Create a Plan for the

Meetings

Coalescing Requirements
When the meetings are over, take the ideas youve gathered and
sort them into general areas of functionality.
Remove redundancies and try to consolidate a list of ideas that
efficiently captures the intent of your stakeholders.
To turn the ideas youve gathered into useful and trackable
components of your project, youll need to coalesce these ideas
into requirements.
The resulting requirements should :
Provide insight into the overall need that must be addressed
Represent and consolidate needs provided by different
stakeholders
Give direction for design, without being too specific about how
it will be accomplished
Serve as a distinct unit of work for purposes of prioritization
and tracking

References
A Project Guide to UX Design: for User Experience
Designers in the Field or in The Making. Second Edition.
New Riders. ISBN: 978-0-321-81538-5.
Smashing UX Design : Foundations for Designing Online
User Experiences. First Edition. Books Library. ISBN:
978-0-470-66685-2.
Effectively planning UX Design Projects
https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2013/01/effectivel
y-planning-ux-design-projects/

Q&A