Skip to main content

Requirements and Apple's "Time Machine"

Apple's Leopard OS will include a service called "Time Machine". It backs up users' files automatically and transparently so that users can restore their machine to any previous state.

The remarkable aspect of this backup service is its ease of use. Consequently, it is interesting to explore it from a requirements standpoint.

Remember why CRUD is crud? CRUD requirements assume that users actually want to create, update, and delete information. But users don't really want to create, update, and delete information. They want to access it to achieve some larger goal. Enabling the user to create, update, and delete information is one way to manage and make the information available, but it is by no means a utopian design.

Remember Gmail and the 'delete' button? Why on Earth would anyone want to delete e-mail? Notwithstanding some privacy concerns and obsessive-compulsive issues, what users really want is to be able to find, read, and respond to messages of interest. Deleting e-mail helps eliminate clutter that can interfere with these goals, but it's not an end in itself. Thus it is not a requirement.

Similarly, conventional requirements documentation for a backup service would include specifications such as:
The system shall enable the user to backup files.
Or a use case such as:
Create Backup
Yet these specifications and use cases do not represent real requirements. No user wants to backup files. They want to be able to restore files (or, better yet, just have their files available). Backing up the files is an unfortunate design necessity to which the user would prefer to be completely oblivious.

A product manager who represents these design specifications as requirements is doing the company a disservice. It constrains product designers' creativity. Instead of thinking creatively about how they can completely shield the user from the burden of backing up files, they assume that the user must be saddled with this task, and any design work merely tinkers around the edges of making it easy.

Comments

Anton Chuvakin said…
Super-insightful point about backups and restors! I am going to send it to a few folks in our company ...
Roger L. Cauvin said…
Thanks for the comment, Anton!

Popular posts from this blog

Why Spreadsheets Suck for Prioritizing

The Goal As a company executive, you want confidence that your product team (which includes all the people, from all departments, responsible for product success) has a sound basis for deciding which items are on the product roadmap. You also want confidence the team is prioritizing the items in a smart way. What Should We Prioritize? The items the team prioritizes could be features, user stories, epics, market problems, themes, or experiments. Melissa Perri  makes an excellent case for a " problem roadmap ", and, in general, I recommend focusing on the latter types of items. However, the topic of what types of items you should prioritize - and in what situations - is interesting and important but beyond the scope of this blog entry. A Sad but Familiar Story If there is significant controversy about priorities, then almost inevitably, a product manager or other member of the team decides to put together The Spreadsheet. I've done it. Some of the mos

Is Customer Development Pseudoscience?

The “Science” of Lean Startup Lean startup practitioners embrace the scientific method, seeking the "truth" about what business model and strategy will lead to product success. We do so by: Formulating hypotheses Crafting and running experiments to test them Learning from the experiments Iteratively feeding our learnings back into revised hypotheses Sounds pretty scientific, at least in spirit, doesn't it? Yet this process actually neglects a key ingredient in the scientists' mode of operation. To identify what’s missing, let’s examine “customer development”. Customer Development Steve Blank is one of the pioneers of the lean startup movement. He introduced into the lean startup lexicon the term “customer development”. Customer development consists of sessions and interactions with customers to test hypotheses. For example, a product manager might interview a prospect, asking if she agrees with the product manager’s hypotheses about the problem

Interaction Design: the Neglected Skill

Your product development organization has a big, gaping hole in it. (Be prepared to feel defensive as you continue reading.) One of the most important roles in product development is the role of interaction designer. An interaction designer designs how the users will interact with the product and conceptualize the tasks they perform. He decides whether, for example, the user interface will be command driven, object oriented (clicking on objects then specifying what to do with them), or wizard based. The interaction designer decides the individual steps in the use cases. Every company has one or more people that play the interaction designer role. Usually, those people have little or no expertise in interaction design. Sadly, they typically don't even realize how unqualified they are. Let's see who typically plays the role at companies. Engineer . An engineer is an expert on building what is designed. Yes, an engineer may know how to design the internal structure of the hardware