Building the WSAD alpha around user needs

User needs are the organising principle for the WSAD alpha. They are reasons why someone would come to the site along with what they want to achieve from his or her visit. Our user needs for the WSAD alpha came from:

• Speaking to users from the different audiences around the world including students, teachers, participants, parents, journalists, policy makers and partners.
• Answers from a web survey which over 120 people answered in a week.
• Data from web analytics for worldskillssaopaulo2015.com and worldskills.org
• Talking to stakeholders from WorldSkills and WorldSkills Abu Dhabi 2017.

We translated information from these sources into user needs. They take the format:

as a [type of user] I want [something] so that I can [benefit]

Framing content and features in this way helps us keep what someone wants to do at the centre of our work and helps us to design and build solutions to help them do that thing as quickly and easily as possible.

You can see the complete list of user needs here.

We’re working our way through these needs: prioritising them and clustering them to form the basis for our work in the alpha. Once we’ve designed and built a solution to a need we will add the link to the live item. That way, everything on the website will be associated with a particular user need and we’ll know if we’ve successfully answered the user’s problems.