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Published by: Judy Cobb 09-17-2013  |  POSTED IN: Traffic Tuesdays

Words Blog 39: Functional Requirements

 

Earlier posts have talked about your website's business requirements and user requirements. Functional requirements are the third category of requirements necessary for your website.

Functional requirements define how you want your website to work. Like the other types of requirements, a functional requirement must be so specific that someone reviewing your website can identify specifically where and how that requirement is met.

A functional requirement should also describe only one feature. If you find you have written a functional requirement with more than one feature, break that into separate requirements, one for each feature.

You can begin writing functional requirements with general statements like "Customers must be able to locate any product they are interested quickly." "Quickly" is a good start, because visitors to your website have limited patience and will go to another website if they don't find what they are looking for in about 7 seconds.

However, "quickly" is not specific enough. You can refine this requirement by giving the programmer some idea of how you want to visitor to find the product.

For example, you might say that they should be able to find a product using three or fewer clicks from the home page. Another strategy for giving visitors quick access to product information is to offer a product search feature from the home page.

The challenge of writing functional requirements is that they might seem, at first glance, to be obvious. You might plan to include a variety of customer information and testimonials on your website. It is often a good idea to include some testimonial information on your home page. However, you don't want to give over the whole home page to testimonials.

You have several choices. One is to post one testimonial with a link to additional testimonials elsewhere on the website. If you do this, you should plan to replace the testimonial periodically. However, you also have some other alternatives.

You can have something like a "slide show," that rotates several testimonials (or testimonial quotes) through a box in the text area of the website or as a banner at the top of the web page. You could also include the first line or two of several testimonials in a text box, with links to the full testimonials elsewhere on the website.

Each of these alternatives can work well for you. However, you should give some thought to which would be easiest for you to maintain and update.

You may not have a clear idea of exactly which strategy will work best, so you can write a more general requirement and discuss the execution with a programmer or website designer. For example, you might write a requirement that says: The home page will include at least three quotes from recent testimonials. Each testimonial quote will have a link to the complete testimonial. The quotes will change every month.

You may have a surprising number of functional requirements for your website. For example, each of these areas requires functional requirements that allow the programmer to know how to set up those functions on your website:

·        How visitors will purchase a product. This includes decisions about whether or not to have a shopping cart, how long you will hold product before the person must purchase it and what payment methods you will accept.

·        How visitors can contact you. Make it easy for customers to find you. Nothing is more frustrating than having a question or issue and not being able to locate clear information about how to get in touch with you.

·        How you want to accumulate data about visitors to your website. Do you want people to be able to register on your website, even if they don't make a purchase? What information do you want them to provide?

·        What follow up do you want to have with your visitors or customers: regular emails, a newsletter, and alerts?

Functional requirements determine how well your website works, so it is worth spending time and energy defining them. You may have questions about how certain features of your website might work. Look at other websites for examples that you like or talk to a programmer or website designer about different strategies you might use. The more time you spend working out these functional details early in the website development (or re-design) process, the more effectively your website will meet your business goals.

Please share your ideas, comments, questions and suggestions about this blog with us. Feel free to leave comments below or to email Judy at [email protected]

 

Judy Cobb is an independent writer and business writing coach whose clients have included Parsons Engineering, Mattel Toys, The Los Angeles Times and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. She has specialized in developing training materials for instructor-led courses as well as interactive online courses and websites. She holds advanced degrees from Columbia University and Stanford as well as an MBA from UCLA's Anderson Graduate School of Management.

Thanks for reading. Jason.
P.S. Don't forget to subscribe below to this blog.
 
About Jason Ciment
Formerly an attorney and CPA, Jason has been working online since 1997. His columns on affiliate marketing can still be found on www.Clickz.com and his book on search engine optimization can be found at www.seotimetable.com.

This blog is published 4x per week and covers website design and SEO tips as well as a wide range of tips and advice for working and living online more efficiently and enjoyably.
 

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