Tips for capture a project’s UX requirements

A designer’s main job is to create awesome user experiences. However, without patience, comprehensive research and a thorough understanding of a project’s requirements, many of them fail to do so. If you are a designer looking to understand and capture UX requirements, read more below.

Ready to learn the steps you need to follow to create great designs? We are ready too. But first, let’s take a moment to define UX requirements:

Let’s break it down to simplify things. Think about job descriptions. What are they exactly? They are requirements that arise from a company identifying that it has a problem. The problem is it needs a new employee and the solution is hiring a new one. To solve the problem, the company needs to prepare a list of requirements. These requirements are what make up the job description.

See Also: 18 Things You Should Never Say to A Graphic Designer 

UX requirements are very similar to job requirements but for products and services. The only difference is that instead of focusing on who to hire, they focus on who will be using the product/service. They are what is needed for product/service growth and success.

Moreover, UX requirements need to be clear and user-centered. There should be no room for ambiguity.

How to capture UX requirements:

• Brainstorm

Get everyone involved in brainstorming and ideation sessions. Make sure that everyone understands that there are no bad ideas. Actually, some bad ideas can ferment into brilliant ones! Brainstorming is a great way to spark creativity and generate requirements early on.

• Conduct stakeholder meetings

Now that you have a general idea of the requirements, it’s time to dig deeper by conducting stakeholder meetings. These meetings will naturally be more formal. However, they should also encourage sharing ideas openly.

Furthermore, use these meetings to ask the following questions:

1. How does this product fit into your overall strategy?
2. Who do you consider to be your biggest competitors?
3. Who are your customers today and who will they be in 5-10 years?
4. What qualities do you want users to attribute to your product?
5. What problems do your solutions solve?
6. Who will be using this feature?

See Also: 20 Awesome Design Tips for Non-Designers

• Create a prototype

A sketch or a low fidelity prototype can really help stakeholders understand more about basic functionality and notable constraints. They also help you avoid inviting critique while being cheap time savers.

Bonus Tip: Make sure to keep distractions in your prototype to a minimum. This helps keep stakeholders engaged and focused.

• Interview users

You are now ready for Interview users. User interviews must be short, light and conversational. Moreover, the UX researcher needs to guide the user through the interview. It is a good idea to record or video the interview for future reference.

These user interviews will help you get insights into product use, users’ problems and pain points as well as users’ objectives and motivations.

You can also ask questions such as:

1. – What do you hate about this interface?
2. – Where did you make mistakes?
3. – Where did you waste time?

Answers to these questions can help you identify the problems and create better solutions.

• Define user stories & personas

After brainstorming, interviews and prototyping, it’s time to put the information you have collected into practice using user stories, personas and scenarios.

1. A user persona is the character that represents your ideal product/service user.
2. User stories define who the users are, what they do and how they use the product/service.
3. Scenarios define how users perform their tasks on your product/service.

Defining the above helps you extract the correct functional requirements. Moreover, you can couple your findings with empathy maps to get more key insights that you can iterate through prototyping.

• Document

You are almost done! The only thing left for you to do is to put all your hard work onto paper and add to it some actionable insights. In this step, you bring all the specifications and put them together cohesively. Make sure to list both technical and product requirements.

How do you capture your UX requirements? Is there a different process that you use? We would love to read more about your experiences and insights in the comment section below. 

The post How to Capture UX Requirements Easily & Effectively appeared first on The Global Now.