https://www.w3.org/TR/web-sustainability-guidelines/#understand-user-requirements-or-constraints

 Identify and involve users and affected communities, and research their needs.

XWiki is an open-source, community-developed product, so understanding user requirements happens largely in the open: audiences and their needs surface through public design proposals, community surveys, the forum, and the issue tracker.

This guideline is scoped to how we identify audiences and understand their requirements. The related aspects of involving users throughout the project and validating usability through testing are covered respectively by rules 2.14 and 2.16.

Success Criteria

Audience evaluation

 Identify the primary and secondary users, and affected communities, for the project. Use research, testing, analytics, and reviews to understand their needs and the project's impact on them. Involve users throughout the project.

We identify our audiences and research their needs through several open channels:

• Documented personas on the design sub-wiki, e.g. the Reader persona and the survey-derived Survey Personas (2017) / UX Personas.
• User surveys and their published results (e.g. Features Survey Results), including dedicated usability surveys.
• Design proposals are discussed openly with the community before being built, in particular in the forum
• The issue tracker (jira.xwiki.org) where users report needs and vote on feature requests, feeding prioritization.
• Open development (Pull Requests, Committership) as described on the Dev Practices page.

What we are missing

• Persona and audience definitions exist but are partially dated (2017) and not consistently maintained; there is no current, explicit statement of who our primary vs secondary audiences and affected communities are.
  • Define a role responsible to maintain this
  • Update the primary vs secondary audiences and affected communities definition
• Needs research is largely reactive (forum / Jira / occasional surveys) rather than proactive or analytics-driven.