Mining Potential Requirements by Calculation of User Operations

Literature Review

User requirements can be categorized as explicit or implicit (Figure 1). For the former, users know what they need and can express it explicitly. Thus, user requirements can be obtained through verbal descriptions, such as questionnaires (Zelesniack et al., 2021; Zheng et al., 2018), interviews (Martin et al., 2012; Shukoor et al., 2018; Willard et al., 2018), and online feedback (Zanker & Jessenitschnig, 2009). After collecting user requirements, their intentions can be translated into functional requirements. These methods include user experience-based research, such as trial run and usability assessment (Castellano-Tejedor et al., 2020; van Haasteren et al., 2020); and the evaluation of the degree of usability, mainly based on physiological ergonomic conflicts. Subsequently, user requirements are interpreted as new design solutions (Hansen & Rosen, 2019; Sen & Sener, 2020). These methods are effective in identifying explicit user requirements through quantitative or qualitative analyses.

Meanwhile, implicit requirements reflect users’ potential intentions (Guo et al., 2019). According to the construct of subconsciousness in psychology (Leonard, 2013), most people do not know what they really need and like. Subsequently, instead of blaming the product, some people blame themselves when they fail in their daily jobs (Norman, 2013). For example, they might experience negative emotions if they miss the trash can when throwing trash away, dial the wrong phone number, drop a pen on the floor, or spill water on a keyboard; however, they do not expect different product designs to solve these problems.