Information Architecture Series: Part 2 – What do they want or need?

This is possibly the hardest question to be answered regarding information architecture. I have been in meetings when the customer will say “I want it to look flashy”. Seriously? I figured I would throw an animated flame bar on the page and maybe a scrolling marquee saying “I am looking flashy”.

Not every customer is in this same state though. There are customers who know exactly what they want and even have some basic ideas on how to accomplish it. Your objective during this part of the questions is just to gain a baseline of what they want and what they need.  

Need: The information that must be part of the solution in order to succeed. If you were to give a weight to these items, it would always be 5 out of 5.

Want: The information that would be helpful to make it easier for the solution to succeed. If you were to weight these is would be 1-5 out of 5.

An example of how this can be broken down is below:

Title	Description	Want/Need	Weight
Look Flashy	Customer wants it to look flashy	Want	3
Link to the report	Customer wants to link to the report on the Internet	Want	4
Management Approval	Customer needs management approval workflow before publishing any link to the general audience	Need	5
Management Dashboard	Management wants to have a single glance dashboard of all of the projects in the pipeline and whether they are on target with RYG indicators.	Want	3
Update Links	Customer needs to be able to go into the report and update the link. Then they need to bypass the approval process for management.	Need	5

In this short list, you may have noticed that Management has a need to approve “any” link before publishing and the customer wants to be able to bypass the approval process for updating links. Your first inclination may be to just agree with management and override the customer, but that may be wrong. There may be a business reason that the manager may not have thought about to bypass the management approval. Talk to both at the same time to work it out.

Now that you scored everything, what do you do with the scores? Nothing. This is really just so you and the customer are on the same page when it comes to the priorities of the requirements. It is as simple as Needs must be there. Wants can be there, but the number helps with setting which ones can be done in the time and budget allotted.

 

Unfortunately, you are far from collecting the requirements. You have found out the customer needs, but you really haven’t found out the target audience or their needs.