When you launch your application or web site, you want to be sure your investment will pay off. How would you feel if you discover that users just stare blankly at the screen wondering what to do with it, and then leave? Usability Requirements Analysis is a way of providing a roadmap that keeps the creation of your application on track to meet your target customers.

We strongly recommend carrying out a Usability Requirements Analysis phase as soon as possible in the cycle, ideally before beginning functionality development or interface design.

Our Usability Requirements Analysis process will set up the guidelines for development and design so that things don’t get lost on the way to launch date. Here's how we do it:

We discuss your business requirements with you

If you have an online store, you will want your users to be able to shop easily for your products. If you are providing an online application, you will want them to be able to accomplish tasks without taxing your customer support resources. Or if you are providing important content for a community, you will want to ensure that they can easily find the information.

These are all significantly different business goals that will require different user experience design strategies. We work with you to identify these business goals and establish a critical frame of reference for evaluating usability for your application. This is the backbone of the user experience design.

We interview representative users and other stakeholders

Speaking directly with representative users, either in person or via phone/Skype conversations, is an extremely valuable way to identify critical real world requirements.

Users invariably do not lay their requirements out in a form that can be readily woven into a design strategy. They speak in terms that are very specific to their own situation – and that means different users can ask for enhancements that contradict each other. We are highly skilled at communicating with users in a way that can make sense of what they really need.

We analyse requirements to establish key user roles and tasks

The information we glean from these interviews provides the basis for our analysis of their diverse requirements. Through this analysis we identify the key roles that users will assume when using your application. Roles are sets of related tasks that a user needs to accomplish in order to achieve some identifiable outcome.

Strong role definitions are the basis for all strong user experience designs.

Outcome: We produce a Design Principles and Recommendations Document

The Usability Requirements Analysis document will lay out the design principles and recommendations that can act as guidelines for both functional and interface design stages.

This simultaneous guidance for both developers and designers helps ensure everyone can work from the same roadmap. We produce Usability Requirements Analysis documents that can speak articulately to developers and designers in terms that they can understand and act on.