Lecture 5: UCD: Requirements

Uptill now our focus was on understanding the users now we are moving towards the generation of the requirements. At first a contextual inquiry is done by an expert being playing the role of a user. An interview is done by the designer at the work space of the expert. This kind of an interview is a step towards generating the data for the designer.

After understanding the user and their characteristics their possible interaction with the system is being studied. Functional, non-functional requirements are gathered. Some fictions users are being created naming Personas a sample persona is attached here. This persona is the part of the evaluation study of the evaluation of the Brighton and Hove City Wildlife website. (http://www.citywildlife.org.uk ).

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Babar

Babar is a graduate student at Sussex University. He has been a great adventurous in his life. He has a keen interest in preserving wild life but being a Engg. Student he found a less time to gather information about his interest. He is 25 and living in Seaford sharing a flat with his country fellows who also study in different departments at Sussex. He is new in UK and has to travel daily from seaford to Falmer. He is really impressed by the landscape of the area. He takes classes on Mon-Tue and Friday and rest of his days are free and he really want some activity in those days. Different fish types whom he never came across in a superstore increased his anxiety about the wildlife in the surrounding areas of Brighton.

Studying wildlife and getting information about the local life take him to the local website for the wildlife and now he is a permanent visitor of this site. He is a regular internet users and have a sound knowledge of latest technologies. Following is the list of annoyances he sight at the site.

Scenario

On his way back home he came across to see an owl with a tag. He is now curious to know about this particular specie. Approaching flat back he logged into the site and start searching the site for this particular specie. He ends up with a frustrating look at the website because there is no easy way of finding the details about any particular specie.

 

 

List of annoyances  

• Sign in buttons too short to read
  
• Long wait to get his details verified
  
• Site navigation buttons too small
  
• How to guides in Getting Started section are in downloadable pdf format it should be in html format.
  
• the new post and reply buttons were enabled to guests but they lead to signin page they should be disabled for guests.
  
• Within forum thrs no navigation to the main website
  
• There was no indication in Events section of the forum that which events are upcoming and which have been passed in the past
  
• Don't show which posts are pinned(cant be replied)
  
• No Announcement section
  
• No member introductory section
  
• Instead of having one section for news main page has separate section for each news item that sounds odd
  
• Special places have long horizontal thumbnails
  
• UK BAP links not working but they are still on the Special specie page
  
• In mozila FireFox menu items are really mixing with each other and hard to pick
  
• Manus look like hyperlinks
  
• Site navigation is so poor
  

  
   

Above is the Persona a scenario and a list of annoyances he felt about the webpage. Another way of presenting the system is via Use cases. Use cases have their roots in OOP and software development.

Above is a use case diagram of the famous go game online software. And below is the use case diagram for ATM machines. Both developed by me. There can be a technical problem with them but for the time being I developed these diagrams for the purpose of this writing.