Exploring the Tension between User’s and Main Stakeholder’s Goals: The Role of Client Scenarios Davide Bolchini School of Informatics Indiana University Indianapolis, IN U.S.A. dbolchin@iupui.edu Abstract— This paper introduces the notion of Client Scenario as a conceptual tool to characterize and address the tension between user and main stakeholder’s goals in web requirements analysis. As complementary to traditional user scenarios, Client Scenarios assume the perspective of the main stakeholders of an interactive application in projecting stakeholder-desired behaviors on the user experience. Client scenarios are an important variation over a commonly used technique in requirements engineering (scenarios in general) and can facilitate web designers, requirements analysts and project managers to elicit and model a comprehensive set of requirements from different viewpoints, as they complement the considerations of the user’s needs with the communication and business goals of large web applications. Keywords-component: web requirements analysis, user scenarios, client scenarios, goals modelling, web design. I. INTRODUCTION AND RELATED WORK What do main stakeholders want to achieve by means of the website? What are the goals of the communication through the website? What return on investment (in term of brand awareness, image, new contacts, new clients, revenues) do they expect to gain? The answers to these and other questions determine the actual reasons why a web site exists. In this perspective, the goals of the main stakeholders (those who finance, conceive, design and maintain the site) may be very different from user goals. Let us consider a very simple example. In the case of a famous online bookstore, whereas a goal of the user is to purchase a specific book at the lowest price possible, the goal of the site’s main stakeholders is to bring the user to purchase as many books as possible. Ideally, both goals should be satisfied. Therefore, site requirements should carefully consider both classes of goals, and inform design decision accordingly [1]. On the one hand, high-level stakeholder goals may be dictated by the business model underlying the site. On the basis of a business model (e.g. eCommerce), specific communication goals may also be pursued [2] (e.g. persuade users to consider weekly offers, cross-sell related products on the basis of already purchased ones). Goals, in general, can be defined as high-level targets of achievement for the stakeholders [8][9]. For a university website, for example, high-level goals of the university stakeholders may be: a) Attract new students to the university b) Provide interns with easy-to-reach resources c) Promote an innovative and cutting-edge image d) Attract new research partners It may be argued that part of the main stakeholders goals concern the actual satisfaction of the users. Indeed, in our example, goal b) represents the wish to serve internal personnel (such as students, secretary, faculty staff) with resources useful to their everyday tasks (such as lesson hours, course program, room allocation). As such, a goal of the stakeholders may indeed aim at directly satisfying some needs of the users. Let us consider another example. In a web site for a large city, the key mission of the city hall website is to allow citizens accomplishing administrative tasks through the site in an efficient and satisfactory way. Is this actually a goal of the city hall, or a goal of the potential users of the web site? On one hand, the goal of efficiently serving the citizens in their administrative tasks is an intrinsic part of the mission of the city hall; on the other hand, it is also a wish of the user to minimize the effort of accomplish these tasks by using the website. Also in this case, starting from the generic city hall’s objective or mission, it is natural to adopt the user’s perspective to analyze and decompose the user goals into appropriate tasks and eventually derive salient requirements. These cases in web requirements analysis are quite common (and also quite intuitive to elicit), but they also tend to hide important differences that ultimately underlie the two different viewpoints (main stakeholder’s and user’s) – which do not always overlap. The goal of this paper is to discuss the distinction and importance between user’s and main stakeholder’s goals in web requirements analysis and to introduce a conceptual tool – Client Scenarios – which allow modeling main stakeholder’s goals in relationship to (and not separately from) the requirements for the user experience. The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section II provides examples of important differences between user’s and main stakeholder’s goals. Section III introduced the conceptual elements of Client Scenarios as an important variation over the common technique of user scenarios. Section IV provides salient examples of Client Scenarios and then a synthesis of the contribution is summarized in Section V. 978-1-4244-8797-4/10/$26.00 ©2010 IEEE 21