Introduction

Paola had been maintaining the Windsor Half Marathon that she had designed and built for five years.

The number of people who used the entry form from the web site had increased each year; more than half of the event's 5,000 runners used the web site to sign up.

Paola felt that the 74 web pages could be better organised to meet more of the event's goals, such as encouraging new sponsors and corporate hospitality at the event.

In 2000, the event was taken over by a new race director who was a web user. Paola helped the new organiser define the requirements of a new WHM web site to be taken over by another company.

Requirements definition

Paola organised a full-day requirements workshop. The discussions and decisions were written up as a requirements document and site structure for the new developers.

Instead of discussing the potential expectations and needs of visitors to the site, Paola invited representative visitor types to the workshop. She used the electronic WHM announcement mailing list, which she maintained, to solicit interest.

The workshop was attended by the race organiser, a Sponsor (Nike), an event charity (CRASH), a corporate Friend, an inexperienced runner and an experienced runner (by proxy). It started with a general introduction to the event, followed by each person's experience of it.

During the course of the day, content and functionality was discussed, as well as short- and long-term targets for the site. Paola wrote the discussions and decisions into a requirements document, and completed the site structure which was included as a 2D diagram.