Users and user requirements Sample Clauses

Users and user requirements. Closely allied to the study of information behaviour is the acceptance that in order to develop successful information systems it is necessary to understand prospective users and their requirements for the system, not least in supporting their established patterns of information behaviour. User requirements studies are therefore a common feature of information systems development projects, particularly when there is a diverse range of users with potentially differing needs. We have therefore reviewed a number of user requirements studies relating to digital cultural heritage projects in order to ascertain insights into the design of the studies, any relevant findings on user requirements, and approaches to incorporating these findings into the projects‟ later phases of development. As noted above in Section 2, the methods used for user requirements gathering in digital cultural heritage projects are varied, but tend to incorporate one or more of the staples of Human-Computer Interaction research and user-centred design practice, including quantitative surveys, qualitative interviews and focus groups, diary studies, log analysis and field or lab-based user experiments, using participant observation techniques and other methods to assess the experiment outcomes. For the studies that we review here reported user requirements gathering methods are as follows: Table 3 Summary of user requirements methodologies for selected projects Project UR Methods: initial phase UR Methods: post demo/prototype Europeana   Expert workshop Development of use cases and scenarios    End user focus groups Online survey Development of personas EuropeanaConnect   Expert user survey Development of scenarios Unknown Multimatch     Expert user interviews – questionnaire based Expert in-depth interviews Development of scenarios Log analysis    Questionnaire Internal evaluation End user task-based experiments The National  Review of previous studies N/A Archives (TNA): Online Strategy  Expert and end user interviews  Online diary study  Interview follow-up to diary studies  Development of personas User domains for the Europeana and Multimatch studies are outlined in Section 3.1.1, and have much in common with the users of interest to the PATHS project. Additional findings of relevance to PATHS include identified user goals from Europeana, the types of searching identified by the UK‟s National Archives (TNA) study, the characteristics used to define personas and the pa...