Getting to the Root of Things
When you’re doing things like contextual interviews, you’re talking to people about their needs. People often offer feature ideas instead of requirements. Your task is to find out what prompted that feature idea originally. Why are people asking you to implement this feature? What problem are they trying to solve?
Just asking usually doesn’t help. People usually have a hard time articulating what they’re really trying to do. Sometimes they’re so far removed from the original problem that caused them to come up with a feature request that they no longer remember what triggered that process, or sometimes they simply don’t have a good grasp of their own needs and desires.
What can you do instead?
One technique for ...
Get Designed for Use, 2nd Edition now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
