How to gather requirements?

"Innovation is not about saying yes to everything. It's about saying NO to all but the most crucial features."                                                                                                                                   

– Steve Jobs

I have saved several doomed projects by spending a few days with the client to carefully listen to their needs and set the right expectations. Armed with nothing but a pencil and paper (or their digital equivalents), the process is incredibly simple, but effective. Here are some of the key points to remember while gathering requirements:

1. Talk directly to the application owners even if they are not technically minded.
2. Make sure you listen to their needs fully and note them.
3. Don't use technical jargon such as models. Keep it simple and use end-user friendly terms such as a user profile.
4. Set the right expectations. If something is not technically feasible or difficult, make sure you tell them right away.
5. Sketch as much as possible. Humans are visual in nature. Websites more so. Use rough lines and stick figures. No need to be perfect.
6. Break down process flows such as user signup. Any multistep functionality needs to be drawn as boxes connected by arrows.
7. Next, work through the features list in the form of user stories or in any easily readable form.
8. Play an active role in prioritizing the features into high, medium, or low buckets.
9. Be very, very conservative in accepting new features.
10. Post-meeting, share your notes with everyone to avoid misinterpretations.

The first meeting will be long (perhaps a day-long workshop or a couple of hour-long meetings). Later, when these meetings become frequent, you can trim them down to 30 minutes or one hour.

The output of all this would be a one-page write-up and a couple of poorly drawn sketches. Some also make a wireframe, which shows the skeletal structure of the site.

In this book, we have taken upon ourselves the noble project of building a social network called SuperBook for superheroes. A simple wireframe based on our discussions with a bunch of randomly selected superheroes is shown here:

A wireframe of the SuperBook website in responsive design – Desktop (left) and mobile (right) layouts