Defining What ‘Requirements’ Means

In a formal sense, ‘requirements’ are narrowly regarded as a set of

logical properties and behaviors that programmers are expected to
implement in code. But in the broader business context – especially
for digital agencies – the concept must be viewed more broadly. At
Lyons Consulting Group, we define a requirement as:

Any aspect, feature, or behavior of a software product, including its

visual appearance, user experience, performance, and all business
goals the client expects it to fulfill.

This perspective has been essential to our success at LYONSCG as a

holistic practice: our ‘requirements’ go beyond technical concerns to
include the broader set of services on which our client partnerships
are built.

How are Software Requirements Developed between Client and

Agency?

At LYONSCG, our process usually begins with a period of discovery in

which we work with clients to understand the needs of their business
and the goals they aim to achieve via eCommerce. The outcome of
this process is a business requirements document or BRD. Although
this is a non-technical document, in many ways it is the project’s
most important specification because it declares the ultimate
objectives of the partnership.

During this period of discovery, one essential practice is a careful

review of client expectations coming from any existing (legacy)
system they currently use. What the client has experienced from
their software – both good and bad – will heavily influence what
they want and what they tacitly expect from a new design and
platform.
A simple but effective exercise to mitigate this risk is to have all
members of the team, from user experience (UX) through design and
coding, explore the client’s legacy system and exercise its
features before the design of the new site is finalized.

How is a New eCommerce Site’s Visual Design Developed?

In the next step of the process, the BRD drives collaboration between
the client and our user-experience (UX), digital marketing, and
creative design experts. From these discussions, two sets of
documents important to site implementation emerge:

 Wireframes, which describe the technical behavior of the site’s

user interface.
 Creative comps, which illustrate the site’s exact visual
appearance.

Before any site implementation begins, the client and agency both
review and formally approve these sets of documents. However, the
specification process doesn’t often end there! Throughout site
implementation, continuous communication with clients is essential
to uncover potential miscommunication or to meet
newly-discovered client needs.

Recommendations for a Successful Project Implementation

Based on our extensive experience designing and building hundreds of

eCommerce sites, LYONSCG offers the following advice both to our
clients and our internal teams:

1. Ensure that business requirements are understood by every

department involved in the implementation. The importance here is
that when gaps or questions arise about a creative comp, a
user-experience feature, or software logic, an understanding of the
business rationale behind the specification documents can fill in the
missing information. Maintaining a bird’s-eye view of a project’s
ultimate goals makes it harder for one department to misinterpret
the specifications provided by another.

2. Keep a clean separation of concerns between wireframes and

creative comps. It’s easy for ambiguities to appear between these two
sets of documents because wireframes use visual aids to illustrate the
UX functionality they describe. If comps depict or imply functionality
that isn’t explicitly described in the wireframes – or, worse, that
contradicts the specification in the wireframes – a delayed or
incoherent implementation may result.

The rule of thumb here is to specify only program functionality in

wireframes, and only style and appearance in creative comps; both
client and agency should also perform a thorough side-by-side
comparison of the two documents before starting implementation.

Last but not least, the client should be apprised not to infer any
functionality from creative comps – this is especially true if the
comps are produced by a third party; and if the client offers comps
which disagree with wireframes, it’s a sign that implementation
should pause for discussion and clarification of expectations.

3. Use consistent technical terminology. In the case of web

development, we’re lucky to have a set of basic terms – the HTML
tag names – to keep things clear. But not all components of user
interface design are so easily described. A classic example is the
misuse of the word “modal” as a noun. From a programmer’s point
of view, modal is an adjective – it applies to layered UI elements
which prevent interaction with the layers below them. So when
‘modal’ is used as a noun, it leaves the implementor unsure of exactly
what’s required – it could be anything from a small dialog to a
full-page window. Similar confusion occurs with words like
“drop-down”. In general, the more parallel the UX and
programming teams can keep their terminology, the better.

4. Carefully scrutinize legacy client sites. As mentioned briefly above,

when clients have existing eCommerce sites – especially
long-standing or complex ones – their intimate familiarity with
their existing system can easily introduce undocumented
assumptions into the requirements discovery process. Because of this,
it’s essential for any features taken from the legacy system to be
scrutinized in its context. Subtle changes to the new site’s design can
have radical implications for the functionality of these legacy
features, and if trouble arises it’s often an unpleasant surprise for
clients who naturally expect the system they already have to be easy
to emulate.

In conclusion, the software industry has always experienced

challenges in formulating an effective project specification process.
The inherent problem is obvious: there’s a huge gap between the
verbal and visual languages used by people, and the extremely formal
languages required to program computers. At a digital agency, the
challenge is further complicated by the many specialists involved –
LYONSCG often incorporates creative design, user experience, digital
marketing, search engine optimization, code implementation, site
hosting, and other services into the scope of a single client
partnership. Our experience with a wide variety of clients and
projects has taught us unique insights into the production of
high-quality software requirements, and we believe that putting
these lessons into practice has helped us become the industry leader
in site quality and client satisfaction that we are today.