requirements.md

User requirements

• What users to find:
  • Find users your work targets, not just your family and friends (sometimes they are the targeted users).
  • An alternative is company/organisation/charity that work with real users (they can get you in contact with the users).
  • A few would be fine, and the more the better.
• Requirements
  • Get the requirements from the real users, not what you think: you might not know what users wants, unless you are a targeted user.
  • Focus on the target use case, i.e., the problem that the users will use your solution for. There can be many other related tasks, but these are out of the scope
  • The requirements should be about the problems or challenges, not the technology or solution
    • For example, 'I cannot create the prompt for chatGPT to generate the text I want' instead of 'I want a prompt autocomplete feature when using the chatGPT web interface'.
  • How to get requirements
    • Recruite some users
    • Collection information such as their gender, age group, education background, student/working, experience/familarity with the topic, etc.
    • Observe how they complete the task you want to support, focusing on the problems and challenges.
      • Have a pre-prepared task and dataset usually works better
    • Talk to the users afterwards for clarification (e.g., why did you do this?) and comments (e.g., what was the most difficult part?)
      • Prepare a few open-ended questions: not just 'yes' or 'no' answer
      • Questions about what happened in the session
    • Take notes during the observation and interview.
    • Analyse the notes to come up with the list of requirements.
• There are a few talks on ['How to Talk to Users'] by YCombinator a very successful startup incubator (airbnb, dropbox, stripe, etc.)
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MT4Ig2uqjTc
  • https://www.ycombinator.com/library/Iq-how-to-talk-to-users
  • https://www.ycombinator.com/library/JQ-how-to-start-a-startup-talking-to-users