A Framework for Understanding User Requirements for an Information Service: Defining the Needs of Informal Carers.

The article presents a framework for understanding user requirements for an information service. The framework provided a useful guide for analyzing and organizing data that concerned the information experience of a group of people who needed information, in this case the informal carers. Due to the self-selecting nature of respondents, it was not possible to state that information needs identified in this study are representative of the whole population. However, findings do reflect those of other researchers and in fact provide more detail. Depending on the micro-time line interview technique to gather data did impose some limitations. Choosing a range of techniques to elicit data, such as task analysis to specifically identify tasks and subtasks, would probably have provided more comprehensive data on various parts of the framework. Furthermore, using the micro-time line interview meant that data were gathered on the most memorable or significant situations that carers could recall, which is a strength of this technique. However, this meant that smaller events and the more day-to-day tasks and the associated information needs were probably under-represented.