Integrating requirements engineering and user experience design in Product life cycle Management

Product development processes and best practices have come a long way in the last decade through continuous evolutions of new lifecycle and process models. Development models such as the waterfall model, spiral model, rational unified process, agile and many others have looked at efficiency of the development processes. These approaches have helped practitioners improve immensely on the efficiency and efficacy of the product development processes. However, product quality needs to be measured by parameters that go beyond the traditional criteria like performance, reliability, reusability etc. A product that has any interaction with the end user also needs to meet a fundamental requirement of being “user friendly”. Development models such as JAD (Joint Application Development) have focused on making products user friendly. Apart from achieving the technical soundness in a product, the success of the product also largely depends on how well the product addresses the primary requirements of the user such as desirability, relevance and usability. Not meeting these requirements leads to bad user experience, which, in turn can actually lead to failure of the product. This paper discusses some of the misconceptions and myths that exist in the industry regarding Requirements Engineering (RE) and User Experience Design (UXD), and how user needs typically slip through the cracks under the name of “non functional requirements”. The paper highlights the need for RE and UXD focus during the overall product development life cycle. In the concluding section an integrated framework for RE and UXD in the PLM process is presented.