Prioritising user needs using MoScOW
If you have written user needs to help you create user-centred content, services or products, unless you have infinite resources, you will probably have to prioritise them.
The writers of this guide did a MoSCoW exercise to prioritise user needs and make sure the guide focussed on the right content.
What they did
To do this the writers:
- Invited 5 members of the project team to join the card sort
- Created a virtual whiteboard with columns labelled Must-do, Should-do, Could-do, Won’t-do
- Wrote each of the 40 or so user needs we identified from our research on a virtual sticky note
- Made a copy of the whole set of sticky notes and gave each copy a different colour
- Assigned a colour to each participant
- Asked everyone to drag and drop each user need card into one of the columns.
They spent about 30 minutes on this exercise.
They wrote definitions for each category, to try to make sure everyone was working on the same basis:
- Must-do = the guide will not do its core job if we do not address this user need
- Should-do = the guide will do its core job, but it will be less useful if we do not address this user need
- Could-do = the guide will be fine in most situation if we do not address this user need, but it would be more complete in certain situations if we did
- Won’t-do = out of scope, either because it is a minor user need, or it is a ‘Could’ or ‘Should’ that we do not have time, budget, or expertise to address right now
Here is what the virtual whiteboard looked like at the end of the exercise:
This screenshot is just to show you what a completed virtual whiteboard might look like. Don’t worry, you aren’t meant to be able to read the individual cards!
What they did with the results
They analysed the results to come to a consensus on which priority to assign to each user need.
They decided to focus on the ‘Must-do’ and ‘Should-do’ user needs for the first iteration of this guide.
Things they would do differently next time
Sometimes there was a clear consensus on which category a user need belonged in. But other times, people differed wildly in their categorisation.
They talked to each other, and it turned out that although they had defined each category ahead of time, people had interpreted the guidance differently.
In particular, some people categorised needs based on how important each need is to the users. This makes sense, as in user-centred design we usually put users first!
But for this exercise, they were trying to decide which user needs were the most important to include in this guide. There are some problems that are extremely important to the users, but are impossible to solve with content like this guide. Even though from a user point of view they might be ‘Should-do’ or even ‘Must-do’, you can’t include something in ‘Must do’ that you simply cannot do.
We recommend making this distinction clear at the start of the exercise!