Excerpt from Undercover User Experience Design
Bowles and Box

Researching the Business

Unlike most users, businesses aren’t afraid to make demands, so it’s usually not difficult to discover business needs. These needs might be unnecessary, vague, or misdirected, but you should still bring them to the surface. Only when business needs are in the open can you explain how to marry them with the needs of the user

The Organization/Company

• What’s the organization’s history?
• What’s the current standing of the organization?
• What are the organization’sg oals?
• Who are our competitors?
• What are our strengths and weaknesses compared with them?
• How is the organization structured?
• How do we want the organization to be seen?

The Site/Product

• What’s the site for?
• What’s the site’s history?
• What does the site do welt? Poorly?
• What technical platform does it run on?
• Does the site use a content management system (CMS)?
• What content management processes support the site?
• How much flexibility for technical change is there?
• How would you rate the site’s usability? Structure? Content? Visual design?

Users

• Who are the current users?
• Are they the people the company is targeting?
• What characteristics do they have?
• Why do they use our site and not a competitor’s?
• What do users say about our site?
• How do they use our site now?
• What do users need to do for us to be successful?

People

• What’s your role in the project?
• Who else is working on the project?
• What are their roles?
• What is the decision-making/sign-off process? How long will it take?
• Who else do we need to talk to?

The project

• What problem will the project solve?
• What are the project’s objectives?
• How do they relate to the overall business objectives?
• Why are we doing the project now?
• What specific project requirements do you have?
• What are the constraints (time, resources, technical, legal, and so on)?
• What’s causing them?
• When do you think the project will be released?
• Have we tried anything like this before? What happened?
• Does anyone else do this well?
• What factors could make the project a success? Could we handle success?
• What issues could throw the project off course? Could we handle failure?
• How could we really screw this up?
• How will we measure success or failure?
• What’s your gut feeling about the project?