Determining and Prioritizing Users Needs and Expectations

Determining and Prioritizing Users' Needs and Expectations

It is essential to know how many users you're serving, who they are, where they're located, what expertise they have, and what their expectations are. Successful computer professionals know that their primary mission is to meet and exceed users' expectations.

A great way to measure the overall success of the directory service is to ask its users whether the service meets their needs and expectations. Even if you don't measure your success by user satisfaction, someone else (such as your boss!) will. Thus you should make an effort to determine users' needs and expectations in advance of the directory service deployment.

Because most end users are probably not familiar with the concept of an open , general-purpose directory service, you may need to educate them before you can extract useful information about their directory needs and expectations. If you already have some application-specific directories or an existing general-purpose directory in your organization, the task of determining user needs will be easier.

This section discusses some ways you can determine and prioritize your users' needs and expectations.

Asking Your Users

One of the best ways to determine users' needs is to ask them. If it is unrealistic at this point in your directory-planning process to conduct a general survey of your users, begin with an unscientific sample that includes your coworkers and friends and expand your survey later. Some good questions to ask users to help deduce their directory- related needs are these:

• How would you use a directory if you had access to one?

• What kind of data about other people do you absolutely need to perform your job? What kind of data would you like to have access to?

• What kinds of information do you expect to find in a directory?

• What data about yourself would you like to see published in a directory for others to use?

• What applications could benefit from being directory-enabled ? How do you expect such applications to behave?

• How could a directory help you get your own work done more efficiently ?

• How often will you search for or read information from the directory?

• How often will you make changes to directory information?

• How would you like to access directory information?

Keep in mind that you will need to provide more context and some additional explanations for users unfamiliar with the concept of a directory service, and that some of the preceding questions will not be relevant if your directory service will be mainly behind the scenes and not directly visible to end users. It is often useful to ask yourself these questions first ( putting yourself in the users' shoes) and think about how you expect to take advantage of the directory service in the future. As someone in the process of becoming a directory expert (or who is one already), you almost certainly have ideas that your users do not.

In addition to or instead of directly asking users about their needs, you can do the following:

• Look at the existing directories that people are using, such as printed (offline) directories, documents maintained by administrators (for example, Excel spreadsheets with names and telephone numbers ), manually maintained lists of partner contact information, vendor contact lists, and so on.

• Ask administrators of existing systems about the needs of the users they support.

• Talk to managers and directors of specific departments to find out about the needs and expectations of the people who work for them.

• Talk to people who support or manage users (for example, system administrators). This is an especially valuable approach if your directory deployment will replace one or more existing proprietary directories.

Accuracy and Completeness of Data

One area where users often have great expectations (even if they are not mentioned explicitly) is the completeness and accuracy of the data stored in the directory service.

Many people expect the data to be complete and up-to-date, and they may become disillusioned with your service if they discover otherwise . For example, one of the most common reasons users access a directory service is to look up contact information about other people, including voice and fax telephone numbers, e-mail addresses, and postal mailing addresses. If the information in your directory is incomplete or stale, people will quickly learn not to trust your directory service.

Because users may not volunteer these data-related expectations, be sure to ask them in a way that makes sense to them. For example, a question like, What is the maximum tolerable propagation delay when replicating directory data? is much more intimidating than one like, If you change your telephone number, how soon do you expect the change to appear in all the online systems? Even better is to provide choices for the user, such as "Within five minutes," "Within one hour ," and "The same day."

Privacy

Another interesting and sometimes contentious set of user needs and expectations is centered on personal privacy. Because your directory service will probably store some data about each person in your organization or each person who visits your e-commerce Web site, it is important to ask your users about their privacy expectations. Whereas some users will be relatively unconcerned about who has access to personal information, others will be very concerned .

When asking people about their privacy concerns, be sure to explain what data you plan to store and to whom you plan to grant access. A lack of understanding of the needs and expectations surrounding personal privacy can lead to some unpleasant political problems as you begin to deploy your directory, so be sure to put some thought into it during the design process. The topic of privacy is discussed in detail in Chapter 12, Privacy and Security Design.

Audience

Next consider how broad the audience for your directory service might become. For example, will the service be accessible only to people inside your organization, or do you plan to replicate some information to a server outside your firewall? If your directory lives outside the relatively safe confines of a firewall, the invited and uninvited audiences for your directory service potentially include everyone on the Internet. For example, you might be designing a directory deployment to service an extranet site visited by partners and suppliers. In such a situation, access control rules would clearly be needed to restrict the audience. It is up to you to decide who the important members of your user base are and design an appropriate service. Access control rules may be used, for example, to limit the access granted to anonymous users of the directory.

Also consider any special needs of your users. For example, in a multinational corporation or for an e-commerce site, the directory service must serve people who come from a variety of cultural backgrounds; thus, differences in language, privacy expectations, privacy laws, and other areas may be important.

The Relationship of User Needs to Application Needs

User needs and application needs are often tied together. Most directory-enabled applications ultimately serve a set of users, so some of your user needs come to your service indirectly via the needs of applications. Work with those responsible for deploying the applications to understand how the needs of the users of each application affect the design of your directory service.

It is also important to consider the needs of the system administrators of your directory-enabled applications and all the other administrators within your organization. The directory service itself and the tools provided for its maintenance must ultimately meet the needs of both end users and all the different kinds of administrators. For example, you may need to develop a special tool that Help Desk personnel can use to easily reset an end user's directory password. The needs of system administrators often lead to some deployment constraints, as discussed shortly, in the section Determining and Prioritizing Deployment Constraints.

Prioritizing Your Users' Needs

As for all other directory needs, try to order the list of users' needs by importance. The process of setting priorities is based partly on fairness (for example, "Many people mentioned this need") and partly on politics (for example, "The director of my department thinks this is important"). Try to be realistic about what you can accomplish, but also be careful not to place a lower priority on a user's need just because you don't agree that it is important.