P402 A User-centred Approach to the Specification of
Telecommunication Services

Rationale
A successful service is one that is both usable and useful. Usefulness is about what the service will be used for (usage), whilst usable is concerned with how the service is used (usability). Marketing people have adopted usage as a key market segment and are beginning to recognise usability as important product differentiator. However services still fail because they contain the wrong functionality and/or the functionality is not usable. One explanation of this failure is in the breakdown in communication between the marketing people and service definers. The risk of breakdown probably increases when defining Europe-wide services as the extra dimension of culture and language must also be addressed.

The proposed project sets out to design a method that bridges service marketing and design. It aims to build a common and shared understanding between marketing people and designers that will ensure that user needs are fully and accurately represented.

Objectives
The main objectives of this project are to:

• define a user requirement specification
• develop the user profile concept
• specify a user-centred method for capturing and integrating the relevant Human Factors data into existing service definition, service integration and marketing processes.
• verify the proposed method by applying it to services under development
• identify an appropriate mechanism for delivering the new user-centred method or
• approach to the relevant communities.

Participants AF BT DT FT IT OG PT RB ST TE TF

Duration - Project start: Oct 94 - Project completion: Dec 96

Results For Full Publication - None