User Research and Requirements Engineering

User research and requirements engineering connect behavioral evidence to implementable design constraints (George, 2025).

Evidence-producing methods

• interviews: subjective models, motivations, constraints,
• focus groups: socially negotiated meaning and preference,
• observation: situated behavior and tacit routines.

Method choice follows the inferential goal, not tool familiarity. For measurable comparisons this often feeds directly into quantitative study design and hypothesis testing.

Requirements formalization

Core artifacts:

• personas as behavior-grounded abstractions,
• user stories in role-action-goal form,
• SMART requirements,
• functional vs non-functional requirements,
• MoSCoW prioritization.

A compact quality condition is:

Inclusion and ethics

Research design must explicitly account for vulnerable groups and asymmetric risk exposure (George, 2025).

Recruitment, consent, and harm assessment are therefore design variables, not administrative afterthoughts.

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