Balancing user requirements and implementation difficulties in the requirements engineering of production tools for user-generated content: a case study of an animation application

Some content forms, such as animation, are superior in many aspects but rarely created in UGC systems partially due to the lack of available content-producing tools. Requirements engineering of User-Generated Content project can be difficult because of the diversities of user types, user abilities and client performance resulted from heterogeneous stakeholders. Based on the joint perspective of requirement analysis and quality control, this paper aims to propose an Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) integrated Quality Function Deployment (QFD) method. It divides users into expert and regular users, and allows the former to directly participate in design decisions and the latter to participate in prioritization. A case study of the requirements engineering of a Web-based animation application was carried out. The results showed the applicability of the proposed method to develop and manage requirements from all stakeholders. The integration of EFA contributed to the identification of unstated requirements to some extent. Also, the House of Quality was constructed and the quality requirements were obtained during the analysis. This approach helps analysts to sort out the priorities of user and technical requirements and achieve balance between them.