Establishing Requirements

Based on all our interviews and state-of-the-art analyses we've now reached a point in our design process where we're able to establish some very necessary requirements.

We're currently discussing the functional requirements of our design, requirements identified specifically in software engineering. During our discussions we're contemplating what our system should do. Establishing these requirements will be an ongoing process since understanding the functional requirements for an interactive product is fundamental. Thus far, our system must be able to calculate what ticket is most suitable for a specific traveler by using the statistics of the travelers previous trips. It'll also have to calculate what ticket to charge a traveler with if the traveler has chosen to pay by direct debit. The interviews suggest that travelers within our target group find these two variations to be interesting.

Data requirements are relevant to all interactive products in some way or another since they capture the essence and value of the required data. Since our prototype is dependent on the recordings of turnstile passings, the data must be up-to-date and accurate, and is likely to change many times a day. Furthermore, the data must persist over many months and probably years to be of any value to the traveler, and therefor there'll be lots of it.

Environmental requirements, also referred to as the context of use, are requirements that refer to the circumstances in which the interactive product will operate. Our application will most likely be used whilst traveling, and so the environment will, at times, be very crowded. A lot of travelers may even have to stand up for the majority of their trips. Because of that fact, using a speech interface will likely be problematic. Moreover, the subway cart can be noisy. These are some examples of the physical environment in which our prototype will operate.

Regarding the social environment of our application, the information of the whereabouts of each traveler will have to be shared and updated with each trip and this information has to be synchronous.

When it comes to the technical environment, we observed that most of our interviewees use different smartphones, and therefor our application has to be compatible with all popular smartphone brands. In order to use our application, accessibility to the Internet is also a necessity.

The key attributes of our target group, or the user characteristics, are frequent user of applications, smartphones and SL Access Cards. Therefor, an uncluttered interface using symbols is a good way to communicate information. A language option is another feature of interest since foreign students are part of our target group. The user characteristics are further investigated through our personas (Hanna, Johannes) and scenarios (scenario 1, scenario 2, scenario 3, scenario 4).

As far as our usability goals and user experience goals go we want our application to be easy to use, enjoyable and invaluable. A user of our application should feel satisfied and the experience should be aesthetically pleasing. The traveler should feel in control and the SL payment system should be very clear.