Defining User Experience Design Requirements & Goals

User experience design (UX), interaction design (IxD), user interface (UI) design and other web/application design professionals refer to UX design as the process of planning and creating a successful, user-centered design. User centered design put's the user's own goals and enjoyment ahead of business goals, and personal assumptions.

Requirements Gathering: The First Step

The requirements gathering phase is the first step of the UX design process. During the requirements gathering phase you and your UX team will spend time determining the needs for a new or altered product design. This usually involves answering the following two questions:

1. What does it need to do?
2. How will we measure success?

Keep it Simple

Your answers don't need to be overly complex, they can be brief and informal. Don't be afraid to adjust and tweak your answers during the project process, so long as the core goals are preserved.

Focus on breadth, not depth and get final sign-off from all departments involved in the product process. Usually this is product management, interaction design, and engineering. It's also strongly recommended that you get sign-off from executives and other key stakeholders.

Write Them Down!

It's very important to physically write these down so that it's ingrained in your team's mind throughout the project. It also provides leverage down the road when it comes time to present designs to upper management. If a manager doesn't like a specific design outcome, you can refer back to the overall goals of the project to explain your motives and reasoning.

Real World Examples

It's easy to describe the process of writing requirements for a UX design project, but what do they actually look like?

Hopefully this fictional example provides you with some insight:

1. Strengthen the companies brand to provide a trustworthy, sophisticated and memorable experience.
2. Increase the registration funnel completion by 20% using AB testing against the current design.
3. Provide users with 1-click access to all major services
4. Within 2 seconds load the reservations module to allow users to view their current reservations
5. Provide quick 1-click access to Live Chat support to minimize frustrating and increase customer support quality

Notice that we've included measurements into some of our goals, this is a productive way to measure the effectiveness of our design decisions. AB or multivariate testing is often the best way to test out the effectiveness of a design.

Now that you have a solid set of UX design requirements, you can work against them to keep your experience design project productive and on track.

What's Next?

The next step in the process is to create realistic user personas, jump to the next article in the series to learn how you can create simple, effective user personas without breaking the bank.

photo by: v222000