Good tools don’t have to be complicated. Here’s one to try next time you’ve got a group of people in need of a closer relationship with their users. Instead of getting caught up in formal requirements or dreary requirements-gathering exercises early in a project, get the team together to generate a list of short statements, each one beginning with the words “I want …”
The steps for creating great I Wants:
- 1. Create context
- Have the group describe in very general terms what the thing that is being created needs to accomplish or have them craft a clear definition of the problem being addressed. Example: “We need to encourage people to join the organization online and we need to take advantage of the Web to manage our membership data.”
- 2. Identify user types
- Base your categories on the users’ tasks or something else about the relevant things that they do (rather than using demographics, etc.) You can flip steps one and two if you’d like, but working on the context first tends to ease the team into the exercise a bit more effectively. Examples: “Existing members; people who already want to be members; people who can be convinced to become members; and people who will never become members.”
- 3. Set ground rules
- I’d suggest that there are only two. Rule one: Each I Want must be from the perspective of a single user who fits within one of the user types defined in the earlier step. Rule two: No one can argue with, alter or remove somebody else’s I Want statement.
- 4. Play-act
- Generate as many statements as possible in the time you have available. (Figure out a Plan B on the fly if you haven’t engaged the team after the first 10 minutes: Consider yourself wildly successful if you get 20 action-packed minutes out of them.)
Your goal as facilitator is to get the team on a roll. Don’t slow down for ranking or spelling or reality. Also, keep the focus on users’ emotional wants. “I want to know who is already a member” will be a more effective than “I want to see a list of members.” The former is about the user’s desire; the latter is jumping to a solution. (Solutions will come later in the project.) “I want leads to become members” and “I want to talk leads into becoming members” are both better than “I want to e-mail leads.”
If your team has any energy left, have them either rank or categorize I Wants. (This is probably obvious, but avoid organizing based on the user types. Generating and talking through the I Wants should provide new ways of thinking about the project that will help new organizing principles emerge.) You can also do the clustering on your own, but if you do, make sure you circulate the results in a day or less or team members may feel less ownership and you don’t want to let them off the hook.
At a bare minimum, the process of collecting and organizing I Wants will better connect the team to their users. You may also find that I Wants become a source for more formal requirements and those early conversations might ultimately contribute to the project’s big solutions.
