Seng 310 Project (1/3) 

Requirements gathering

In this phase of the project you need to identify user needs and establish user requirements. First you need to identify who the stakeholders involved in this project are. As best as you can, identify the goals of the stakeholders and the users' needs for this system. From this information, document the user requirements for the system. Try to be specific and not vague.

Choose and document at least two user profiles. These should be detailed and specific following the persona approach championed by Alan Cooper. Examples
would be:  (taken from "The inmates are running the asylum" by A. Cooper)

"Rupak works as a network installer in Los Angeles. He works with computers all day every day and is very adept at getting them to function, but he really doesn't understand how they work. He survives through his reservoir of superstition and lore, his capacity for rote learning and his endless patience. "

"Shannon is an accountant at a health spa in Tempe, Arizona. She is clueless about the Web, email, networks, the file system, and most everything else about computers, but she is an astonishing whiz with Microsoft's Excel spreadsheet program. She can whip out a new spreadsheet - complete with charts and graphs- that shows sales trend in no time at all".

Try to make your personas, specific and applicable to the project you are gathering requirements for. What's their experience with computers, their major, their lifestyle etc. 

Based on the requirements you have gathered and these user profiles, develop one scenario for each requirement. Note your scenarios should try to be independent  of any particular user interface implementation.

Using these scenarios, do a hierarchical task analysis  of how the goals for each of these scenarios could be met. Using the scenarios and user requirements you have identified describe the usability goals and the user experience goals for this application.

Deliverable (March 10)

Your requirements gathering report will be in the form of webpages in
html format. You can submit them by email to gtzan@cs.uvic.ca
as a tar.gz file anytime before midnight of March 10. You can also
provide me with a url as long as you can ensure that the url
will be valid for the duration of the course.

Please limit your report to approximately 12-15 webpages with roughly the information content of a printed page. Use the description above as a guide on how to structure your report. I am willing to review outlines and preliminary version of your report. Use the design principles and guidelines we have learned to present the information in your report effectively.

The following is a proposed outline for your report - but you are free to vary
the order. This part of the project is worth 33% of the project grade (i.e 10% of the total grade).