Designed for Use, 2nd Edition

Why You Need Requirements, Not Features

You want to think about problems before you think about solutions, for two reasons.

First, you want to be sure that you’re tackling the correct problem—in other words, that the requirements you’re tackling are actually the right ones. If you immediately jump to thinking about solutions, you completely skip that step, and you simply assume that the problems you’re solving are actually the right ones. They’re often not. The problem you think you need to solve is often just a symptom of a deeper problem; your first task is to find that deeper problem.

It’s surprising how easy it can be to fall into the trap of immediately thinking about how to solve a problem, instead of first considering whether you’re actually ...