User Studies for Gathering User Needs and Requirements

This book investigates the role of user involvement in the early phases of product development. It is known that early user involvement has positive effects on user and customer satisfaction and requirements quality, but it may additionally have negative effects on product development time and cost. §A practical approach to early user involvement referred to as 'user study' is presented. It is a way to apply cost-effectively early user involvement to real product development contexts. The goal of the user study is cost-effectively to gather data on users and their needs and to translate them to user requirements that support the development of useful and usable products.§In addition, four case studies in five different product development companies are reported to evaluate the user study approach. The results of the case studies reveal that early user involvement is useful even in a short time frame with relatively low costs. The results additionally provide further support for the successful implementation of user involvement in the early phases of the product development.