What Are Experience Requirements
People have been comparing product design with the process of building a house for decades. I’m not sure why, but everyone seems to have a general idea of how a house is built; it starts with a solid foundation, then needs walls, window and doors. Once the structure is complete, it needs pluming, electricity, and heat. Then the house will get finished with paint, lighting, fixtures, hardwood floors; and finally individuals will hang pictures, move in furniture and decorate. It’s an iterative process that many people can relate to. The architectural field uses ‘blueprints’ to document experience requirements; software development often uses wireframes. At Hostile Sheep we document experience requirements in our solution reports.
Understanding the solution
A Hostile Sheep solution report is intended to help a design team understand all the important aspects of the solution Hostile Sheep is recommending. Each design team will have different requirements and Hostile Sheep will customize the report to meet the specific needs of the design team. We can include as much, or as little fidelity as required to support the team.
Hostile Sheep solutions examine data and insights from all available sources, from tracking-data to user research and stakeholder interviews. Many clients like to think of solution reports as a concentrated requirements document merged with a lite-set of wireframes/sketches. We identify all the important design decisions the team needs, and we rationalize the reason we’re recommending the designs we recommend. This increases the value of our solution reports by offering design advice for various circumstances. For instance, Hostile Sheep may recommend the creation of a blog; but may recommend that certain features (such as commenting or search) be suppressed until a critical-mass of content is reached. We would detail design patterns to support all features we recommend including in the product, but would also illustrate how to scale-back or introduce new features.
When the solution report is well-understood; the product management team can begin fleshing out various strategic-streams (content strategy, social strategy, and search strategy) with the context of key design recommendations being available. This is a bit of a departure for many strategists, who are typically involved prior to any design.
Organizations who are flexible enough to try something different have found the introduction of a Hostile Sheep solution report to be exactly the right artifact to make strategic insights more tangible and actionable by the larger team. Other organizations have successfully used Hostile Sheep solution reports as a replacement to their typical ‘UX design’ process — bypassing the need for wireframes/sketches. And other organizations have used their Hostile Sheep solution reports as an input to their ‘UX design process’ — still creating a full-set of wireframes, but using the Hostile Sheep solution report to ensure a high standard of quality.
Want to learn more about our solution reports? Contact us, and we’d be happy to explain how to get the most value from our reports.
