“Do you want fries with that?”

Do you buy fast food? C’mon... admit it... you do, don’t you? Whether it’s once in a blue moon, once a week, or every day (yes, I’m talking to you!), we’ve all been into those places, whether we admit it or not.

So, we’ve all heard the phrase “Do you want fries with that?” (or its equivalent). Annoying, isn’t it? Sometimes you just feel like shouting, “If I wanted fries, I would have bloody well asked for them!” (or is that just me?)

Well, there’s one chain of fast-food stores I go to where the terminals used by the people serving you have been specifically designed so that they literally can not start entering your order until they know whether you’re ordering just a main item or a meal deal. This forces them to ask you whether you want a meal deal at the very start of your transaction, while you’re still trying to work out what extras you want on the main item: “Did you want that in a meal, or by itself?”

Whose needs does this system fulfil? Yours, the customer’s? Not really – usually, you just want to order what you want, without being interrupted with questions about items you might not necessarily want. The needs of the person serving you? Not really – they don’t care whether they ask you that question or not, just as long as they can record everything you ask for when you ask for it.

This process is being enforced by some marketing executive in head office. “Make sure they always up-sell!” And, away the BA went, to design a system that enforces upselling, despite the fact that this will annoy everyone interacting with the system – users and customers alike. The final result is a system which requires the user to enter either a main item or a meal deal as the first step of the process, even though this is not the natural way for many customers to place their order.

There are other ways to handle this.

I used to work in the fast-food industry myself, a long time ago. Home-delivery pizza. At one point, I was involved in revamping our store’s order-taking terminals. These were very simple creatures with small monochrome LCD text-only screens (it was the ’90s!), and a large touch-pad with various buttons indicating the various items on the menu. I wasn’t a BA at that stage; I was just a person who knew a lot about the store and its menu and ordering processes, having worked there for a couple of years, but who also understood computers. Regardless, the guy programming the system and I came up with something we thought was the easiest way to handle the “Do you want fries with that?” issue.

We decided to build it for the customer’s needs and the order-taker’s ease of use.

The user simply entered the items into the system, using the touchpad, as the customer requested them. The system then worked out whether any special deals had been ordered (1 pizza + 1 garlic bread + 1 drink = Meal Deal A), and advised the final price accordingly. There was no need for the order-taker to interrupt the customer’s flow of thought by asking extraneous questions; the customer wasn’t annoyed by being asked about things they didn’t want, but was happy that they automatically got the cheapest price.

So, when you’re in a business, trying to work out their needs, who do you ask? The executives? The customers? The users? We’re all told that we need to elicit the business needs – but whose needs are we trying to meet? Therefore, as well as eliciting requirements, we also need to decide whose requirements to elicit.