Before
entering into the design stage of your
website, there are certain elicitation
requirements that you will need to take
into consideration. An analysis elicitation
will employ analysis techniques that will
define clear goals, establish target audiences
and available content for the proposed
system.
We
will discuss a few of these techniques.
STATEMENT
OF PURPOSE
The statement of purpose (SOP) is simply an overview of exactly what the system
is expected to be able to accomplish. The SOP that will be drawn up should
specifically determine what is within the systems scope and what is not.
System -
Specifically the name of the system involved
Meaning -
A short statement of what the system is meant
to accomplish
Responsibilities -
A list of exactly what the system is supposed
to provide e.g. online information, contact
with company personnel etc
Exclusions -
A list of exactly what the system is not meant
to provide e.g. site maintenance, follow up
on leads etc
USE
CASE ANALYSIS
One useful analysis technique is to discover different uses people expect to
make of the system. A Use Case analysis will enable you consider external users,
or actors, of the system and the system functions they will use.
A
Use Case diagram can be used to describe a
typical use case scenario and some uses people
would expect to make of the system, for example,
a user who is visiting the site would view
provided by the organisation on the web pages.
This provides an interaction between the user
and the system via the user interface. A web
designer would be responsible to make changes
to the site, while an administrator would update
the web page content in a periodical fashion
to enhance the flow of dynamic content.
ENTITY
RELATIONSHIP ANALYSIS
Another techniques would be to break down the subject domain into entities.
Entities are real world things that will affect the system. Once these entities
are identified, an attempt should be made to establish the relationship between
them. This can be done using an entity-relationship diagram.
EVENT
LIST
In order to clarify the system behaviour, another important system view, the
Event List, should be used. The Event List is a list of events the system must
respond to and deal with. An event is an action that occurs to which the system
must respond appropriately.
An
attempt should be made to consider some of
the events that will occur, how the system
will know they have occurred, and what the
system will do in response and if this requires
a system output of some sort. When viewing
the Event List it is important to distinguish
between the following semantics:
The
event - what happens in the real world
e.g. user clicks on hyperlink
The
stimulus - how the system detects the
occurrence of an event
The
response - what the system must do in
reaction to an event occurrence
The
output - a result that is generated,
if any as a by-product of the response
USER
ANALYSIS
For your website to fulfil its desired objective of enhancing the promotion
of your products and services, considering the people who are actually going
to visit the site is paramount. It is important to be able o identify the people
that would make up a majority of the users of the site and therefore the primary
audience. On realising this, it is the necessary to classify expected users
of the site into web surfers, novice and occasional users, and, expert and
frequent users.
