How to write an app requirements document? In this article, we will discuss the critical role of requirements in mobile app development. What are the types of requirements and what is the right way to develop them? Scroll down and get sample mobile app requirements documentation to help you get started.
Why write a Product Requirements Document (PRD) for mobile apps?
How do I write a product requirements document for a mobile app? To turn your idea into a deliverable mobile app, you need a development team. But finding the right team doesn’t have to be hard. The hard part is clearly explaining your mobile app vision to developers so they can envision it your way.
App Requirements Document Writing Example: Writing a mobile app product requirements document (PRD) can help you facilitate communication between you and other stakeholders. Don’t hesitate to invest time in engineering product needs, as the potential rewards are obvious.
- Increase your own certainty. Discussing the requirements for your mobile app will make everything clearer. Goals, perspectives, characteristics, constraints – your product vision starts to take shape. Identifying product requirements transforms you from vague statements to tangible tasks with full deadlines, budgets, and quality standards.
- Give developers a clear idea of what you have in mind. Having clear product requirements can close the desired gap between what you want for your mobile app and what developers deliver.
- Get just-in-time development and delivery. With documented mobile app requirements, your development team can better understand your project, set priorities, and reduce rework.
- Make sure the final app meets your quality expectations. Since the acceptance criteria are specified in the PRD, your team can easily determine whether you will be satisfied with the delivered application.
- Reduce range creep. A high-quality Requirements Specification prevents you from developing unnecessary features, prevents your development team from working across purposes, and prevents your entire development team from becoming overloaded.
- Reduce expenses. Because well-thought-out requirements help you focus on the essentials, reduce rework, and speed up development, they can save you money.
According to Boehm’s research, rework can cost anywhere from 40 to 50 percent of the total cost of all software development. A major part of rework is caused by requirements errors.
Another advantage of having clear requirements is that they allow your team to detect defects soon after the product is created and fix them at a lower cost than later development or after the application is released. So, don’t think of development needs as wasteful and frustrating, but as an investment in your project that will pay off.
How do I write a product requirements document for a mobile app? The type of requirement
How to write an app requirements document? When you have an idea to make an app, there are three main questions you need to ask yourself:
- Why? Why do you need a mobile app? To help people have your unique experience, to get an additional revenue stream, as an investment – what are your goals?
- WHO？ Who will be using your app? Consider your target users’ pain points, problems, needs, and preferences. What solution do users want from your app?
- How is it? How will you achieve the desired business outcomes and meet user expectations? Think about the features your app should offer.
The answers to these questions make up the three main levels of need for mobile app development: business needs, user needs, and system needs.
There are also a variety of functional and non-functional requirements at each level.
Functional requirements are related to the operation and functionality of the application you want to implement.
Non-functional requirements define characteristics and constraints that are not related to functional requirements. In most cases, non-functional requirements are related to:
- Develop product attributes such as performance, reliability, availability, and availability.
- The development process, describing the development methodology, standards, coding language, time constraints, security, etc.
- External environment, consider how your application connects to other systems and hardware components, whether it complies with company policies, government regulations, etc
If you’re worried about how to write a specification for mobile app development, start by eliciting your business needs.
Business needs
When writing your business needs, focus on why building a mobile app is critical to your business, the changes the app will bring, and the results you expect it to provide. To give your development company a clear picture of your product vision, you should document your business requirements in a mobile app business requirements document (BRD).
Please note that while we use the term “document”, this is not necessarily printed paper or Google Docs. You can use diagrams, databases, spreadsheets, or requirements management tools to store your requirements, or you can combine these with traditional text documents.
Example of an app requirements document: Based on the vision and scope document presented by Karl Wiegers in the third version of the software requirements, we have prepared the following BRD structure:
| 1. Business requirements | |
|---|---|
| background | Describe the circumstances that prompted you to create the idea to create a mobile app, the overall goals of the project, and the improvements you think it will bring to your business. |
| Business opportunities | Highlight the strengths and advantages of your application compared to existing solutions on the market. Describe how your mobile app will keep up with market trends and evolving technology. |
| Business Goals | Summarize in a quantitative and measurable way what benefits you can expect from building a mobile app. Your goals must be SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound). One goal might be something like: “I want to bring in X dollars of revenue and Y% return on investment in Z months.” ” |
| Success metrics | Identify which metrics will help stakeholders understand that your project has been successful. For example, for an e-commerce app, to bring in X dollars in revenue in Z months, a good goal might be to get two cross-sells on 80% of your orders. |
| Vision Statement | You can describe your product vision using the following format: for (target users) who (need or want to change something) in (product name) is (mobile app) that (will provide unique valuable features, key benefits) different from (current business model or competitors). My Products (the benefits that distinguish your app from the competition) |
| Monetization model | From the very beginning of project development, define how your mobile app will generate revenue. You can check out the possible monetization models for mobile apps in our previous article. |
| Operational risk | Think about situations that could adversely affect your mobile app development. For example, what if there are too few downloads? You mainly need to estimate the likelihood of this risk and how it will affect the project as a whole. Actions are then planned to control, mitigate, or eliminate the risk. Involve other stakeholders in decision-making. |
| Assumptions and dependencies | Business assumptions reflect your observations of the way to achieve your desired business goals. Given that the goal is to bring in $X in revenue in Z months, you can assume that a new app will attract 100 active users who spend an average of $15 per month. Highlight external factors that your mobile app development relies on, such as third-party vendors, partners, other business projects, industry standards, or legislation. |
| 2. Scope and Limitations | |
|---|---|
| List of features | Define what features your application must, should, can, and not provide based on your business goals, time and financial resources, and issues with existing business solutions, if any. |
| Initial release scope | Define which features you should develop first. For help deciding, read our article on nine techniques for prioritizing features for mobile apps. |
| Scope of subsequent releases | This section describes features that don’t require much development first due to their complexity, high cost, or low profitability. You can implement them in future app versions. |
| Limitations and Exclusions | Lists the features that you must remove from the scope of the project. You can add them to subsequent releases. |
| 3. Business Background | |
|---|---|
| Key stakeholders | Create profiles of everyone who has some kind of relationship with your project: people who are actively involved in the development of a mobile app, people who rely on its results, and people who influence its results. To get the ball rolling, you can start with your company organizational chart. |
| Project Focus: | Agree on features, quality, schedule, budget, and team size. Prioritize the factors that lead to the success of the project and define the constraints of the project development. Discuss the degree of freedom you can grant your project manager to complete the tasks that lead to the success of the project within existing constraints. |
| Deployment considerations | Describe the improvements you want to make to your mobile app to expand its market share. These can be extra features to reach audiences in other countries, or new cloud data storage to make your app more adaptable. |
How to write an app requirements document? You can use different tools to represent the scope of your project. The most comprehensive is the Lean Canvas. It represents the various parts of the business plan that are critical to developing documentation for all mobile apps: groups of users and their main problems, the solutions your app will provide, and the unique value proposition (UVP) and other benefits. In the Lean Canvas model, you can describe the channels that will be used to attract your target users and tell you how well your business is performing. The Lean Canvas can also help you identify monetization models for your mobile app as well as other potential revenue streams.
Deep Dive: How to make a business model canvas for mobile apps
App Requirements Document Writing Example: To facilitate clear communication between all project stakeholders, at Mind Studios, we also use mind maps. The tool reflects the logic of the mobile app and the interconnection between its main components.
Here is a simple example of a mind map for a meditation app like Headspace:
Read more about how to make a meditation app like Headspace.
Keep in mind that drafting business requirements involves all project participants. It’s always a joint effort.
How do I write a product requirements document for a mobile app? User Requirements
After identifying your business needs, it’s time to focus on the needs of your users. You’ll need to outline the potential goals for users accessing your app and the actions they’ll take to achieve those goals. But whose opinion should be taken into account when drafting user requirements?
The problem is, there is no single type of app user. Instead, there are many types of users asking for something different: investors, business owners, end-users, developers, distributors, regulators, marketers, etc. Your task is to listen to everyone and find a balance between the needs of different user groups.
When it comes to user needs, it’s wise to start with these three steps:
Step 1 – Categorize users. Group all stakeholders into user classes. You can sort them based on the following criteria:
- Access level (Guest, Regular, Paid, Provider, Admin)
- Tasks they perform (find, view, read, select, buy, share, comment)
- App features they use (search, map, sort, compare, pay, etc.)
- Frequency of visits (daily, monthly)
- Platform used (iOS or Android)
- Native language (or other demographic data such as location, gender, education, and family status.) ）
Read more about how to find the target audience for your mobile app.
Step 2 – Determine the product champion. Choose an individual who can represent each group of users and communicate user needs to your project manager. Being a good product champion means having a clear vision of the benefits your app will bring to your users. In turn, the product champion must be a real user in order to perfectly understand the user’s pain points and urgent needs.
Step 3 – Agree on the requirements decision makers for the project. Agree with stakeholders on the representation of each group of users. Be careful not to ignore any stakeholders to avoid complaining that the final application doesn’t meet the expectations of the stakeholders.
After identifying qualified user representatives, get their input on the needs of both types of users.
| User Requirements | |
|---|---|
| Functional user needs | Outline the tasks that users want to perform in your mobile app, and list the likely user interactions with your app. Based on this data, you can derive the core functionality that your app must provide to enable these interactions. |
| Non-functional user requirements | Gather user expectations related to your mobile app’s performance, security, usability, and more. |
| Deployment considerations | Describe the improvements you want to make to your mobile app to expand its market share. These can be extra features to reach audiences in other countries, or new cloud data storage to make your app more adaptable. |
Document feedback from users in the User Requirements Document (URD). To do this, you can use the following techniques:
App Requirements Document Example: User personas are a useful tool that allows you to visualize your target users. For each user persona, choose a name and a photo, then list the user’s needs, desires, and goals. Write down the key reasons why the persona will use your app. Here are some examples of user personas we’ve made for social media apps like LinkedIn:
User Stories. Itemize the actions that users will perform in your app to achieve their goals. Then arrange these actions in a natural order to determine the typical user browsing your app. Depending on the scope of your project, you can primarily outline epics – complex user actions that you can break down into smaller steps that users will take when using your application. Epics are user stories, usually written as follows: As a < user type >, I want to < a target > so that I can < a reason >.
In agile development, user stories are often put into the product backlog. When negotiating the scope of software development for the first and subsequent releases, you and your development team will consider the user stories in the backlog and choose the most relevant. By arranging user stories, you can form a product roadmap that clearly defines which application features you should implement and when. The following examples relate to two of the most common basic epics of any mobile app:
System Requirements:
How to write an app requirements document? The complete product requirements document for a mobile application should contain requirements on how the application must operate. Resist the temptation to sloppily write system requirements based solely on user needs and business needs. Talk to the developers. They’ll give you feedback on the original plan for whether the functionality of the app can be technically implemented. When talking to developers, you’ll reveal potential threats to project development and can work together to develop a Plan B to dodge them.
After a constructive conversation with your team, write down the agreed requirements in a Software Requirements Specification (SRS) that includes the following blocks:
| System Requirements: | |
|---|---|
| Feature Requirements | Make a list of features that developers can build to enable users to complete tasks based on your business needs. To do this, use an existing mind map or user story. After defining what your application will do, assign a unique name and number to each functional requirement, as well as a short description, justification, and status. |
| Subsystem requirements | Describe the requirements of your mobile application in terms of software and hardware subsystems. For example, if you’re building a fitness activity tracking app, you’ll need to write requirements for a wearable tracker that syncs with the app. |
| Business Rules | Since every business is bound by laws, policies, and industry standards, these will be an obvious source of SRS requirements. The following is a shortlist of demand sources: Company PoliciesGovernment RegulationsIndustry StandardsUser Roles and Permission LevelsIf-then User Behavior Model Calculation Algorithms, if any |
| Data Requirements | When developing mobile applications, massive amounts of data need to be created, stored, modified, displayed, deleted, processed, and used. To manage the flow of data, you need to: Outline the logical model for data entity interactionsDefine entities in a data dictionary to specify how the system must enforce data analysis, retention, or processingSelect the type of data report (spreadsheet, chart, dashboard, etc.) |
| Mass attributes | Writing clear quality standards ensures that developers will meet your expectations for the final product. You need to consider the quality attributes that are important to your business and users, such as usability, performance, and security (external attributes) Developers such as efficiency, modifiability, and portability (internal attributes) Discuss with other stakeholders which attributes are critical to the success of your application and prioritize them. Write down specific expectations for each property using suitability criteria – Describe the quantitative requirements of the standard that your application must meet. Translate quality attributes into technical specifications and write acceptance tests for your team so they can check the results. |
| External interfaces | This section of the Mobile Application Functional Requirements document is required to ensure that your application can communicate properly with users and external hardware or software systems. In SRS, you need to write down the following requirements: User interface. Specifies the design of the mobile application screen (standard for fonts, icons, color schemes, images, screen size, layout, resolution, etc.) software interface. Describe the interaction between your application and other software components, including other applications, websites, libraries, databases, and tools. Hardware interfaces. An overview of the data and control interactions between each supported device type, software and hardware, and the communication protocols to be used. Communication interface. In your mobile app’s SRS, state the requirements for any communication features your app will use, including in-app messaging, push notifications, email, and web protocols. |
| restraint | Document the constraints that limit the design, operation, and implementation of mobile applications. First, check that your mobile app requirements specification meets Apple App Store and Google Play Store requirements. In addition, specify other system constraints, such as rules that are determined by the programming language used or the use of third-party APIs or content. |
| Localization requirements | If you want your app to be used in a different country, culture, and geography than the country, culture, and geography in which it was created, then you should set up change requirements: currency, date, number, address, and phone number, formatting, language (including country, spelling conventions, local dialect, direction), compliance with regulations, and the ability to comply with laws and regulations, time zone measurements, and other variables that take into account cultural and political issues |
Example of writing an app requirements document: Let’s take a closer look at the tools available to represent system requirements in a software requirements specification for a mobile application.
Spreadsheets provide traditional presentations in rows and columns of the functionality of the application you intend to build. Let’s review a snippet of the functional requirements spreadsheet we drafted as part of the real estate mobile app development document:
You may be interested in: How to make a real estate app like Zillow.
An Entity Relationship Diagram (ERD) represents how data entities relate to each other within a system and the connections between elements within those entities. Here’s an example of the diagram we used in the Requirements Specification document for our food delivery mobile app:
Learn more about building food delivery apps like Postmates
How do I write a product requirements document for a mobile app? Methods for developing and managing requirements
As the project evolves, changes in the software requirements for mobile applications are inevitable. The new requirements can come from anywhere: your investors can insist on getting a return on their investment faster than you planned; Users can access a competitor’s app because your app doesn’t offer the features they like; Subsequent software updates may impose additional restrictions on your mobile app development.
It’s tempting to outline the software needs of mobile app development once and for all, but doing so can lead to project failure. Let’s figure out why requirements development is an iterative process.
The drafting requirements for a mobile app project typically involve the implementation of four activities:
- Elicit or ask users what they expect from a new product, listen to them, and see what they do
- Analyze or process user feedback to understand, classify, and correlate this information with possible mobile application requirements
- Specification collection, including the transformation of vague user input into thoughtful, structured, written requirements documents with visual illustrations
- Validation, which is about confirming from stakeholders that the requirements specification you created is accurate and complete
While doing the analysis, you may become aware of some inaccuracies that will bring you back to the heuristic. When writing a mobile app product requirements document, you may run into some gaps that require more analysis. If stakeholders point out errors in your requirements document, you’ll have to rewrite some statements, re-analyze, and even conduct follow-up polls. Only by interweaving and iterating on these activities can stakeholders be provided with relevant mobile app requirements throughout the development cycle.
App Requirements Document Example: At Mind Studios, we define and agree on the initial product requirements during the discovery and idea validation phases by taking the following steps:
| elicit | Define business requirements |
| Identify stakeholder groups | |
| Select a demand decision-maker | |
| Analyze your target audience by doing the following: panel interviews, questionnaires, workshops, search queries, social media analytics, forum research | |
| Perform file analysis | |
| Check the issues with previous solutions | |
| Identify user needs | |
| analyse | Conduct a SWOT analysis of your competitors |
| Analyze the feasibility of the idea | |
| Carnal demands | |
| Prioritize needs | |
| Export functional requirements | |
| Make sketches and models | |
| Create a glossary | |
| specification | Adopt a requirements document template |
| Document business rules | |
| Specify non-functional requirements | |
| Use diagrams, spreadsheets, and wireframes to document requirements | |
| verify | Create a prototype |
| Testing requirements | |
| The right requirements | |
| Define acceptance criteria |
Read more about the mobile app development process to launch a successful app.
How to write an app requirements document? In the name of project success, you need to control fluctuations in demand through sound management. Project managers and/or business analysts can take on this responsibility. Project managers and business analysts have different requirements management tools to:
- Track the needs of changing requirements
- Perform an impact analysis to determine what these changes will bring to project development
- Track requirements maintenance
- Track the status of each requirement
- Track requirements issues
- Maintain a history of changes to requirements
Characteristics of a good mobile app development requirements document
Since the interests of all stakeholders intersect in product requirements, you need to make sure that your needs are equally clear and understandable to investors, users, and developers. How do you build a mobile app requirements document to meet everyone’s needs? Not only the content of the requirements document, but also the tone of voice can help you with this.
Go above and beyond to get high-quality product requirements documentation. Discuss the level of detail, presentation technique, and writing style that works best for stakeholders.
In a perfect world, the mobile app requirements you declare in your PRD should be:
- Complete. For example, each feature requirement should contain enough information for developers to be able to implement it correctly. If you have some gaps, mark them as TBD (pending) and follow up later.
- Right. Both you and your development team should verify the correctness of your mobile app product requirements document. If the requirement complies with technical specifications, business rules, industry standards, and relevant laws, you can consider the requirement to be correct.
- Persistent. This means that none of the requirements in the PRD should contradict other requirements in the same PRD.
- Feasible. Given the known staff capacity, time, and budget, it is essential to be able to implement each product requirement in the existing operating environment. Agile development methodologies and proof-of-concept prototyping help you assess the feasibility of your requirements.
- Precedence. Each requirement, whether a functional or user requirement, must be ranked according to the importance of the implementation for a particular release.
- Modifiable. Because requirements can change during development, your product requirements document structure needs to be flexible.
- Verifiable. Product requirements must be measurable and specific so that testers can test them and determine if specific requirements are being implemented correctly.
- Unambiguous. One of the main reasons to document product requirements for mobile apps is to reduce miscommunication. You need to write each requirement so that it can only be explained in one possible way.
We strongly recommend creating a glossary from the very beginning of development. The truth is, developers aren’t familiar with your business language, and you may not be proficient in programming. A lack of understanding of terminology can lead to rework, missed deadlines, cost overruns, and unnecessary debates.
App Requirements Document Example: Mobile App Requirements Document Template
Some businesses need a detailed list of requirements supported by well-thought-out technical specifications, while others settle for a superficial approach. No matter what group you belong to, you have to start somewhere.
As a guide for developing your initial requirements, you can fill out our mobile app product requirements template. It provides enough core information to simplify and accelerate developers into your project, saving you time and money.
An introduction to the product requirements document for mobile applications produced by Mind Studios
introduce
Briefly outline the industry your business in, the philosophy behind your mobile app (what made you think about building an app?). and how you expect the app to improve your business.
Business needs
- Why did you decide to create a mobile app?
- Share your unique experience
- Create additional revenue streams
- Improve current business processes
- Get a return on your investment
- Another reason
- What is the main purpose of your project?
- Launch a new business, product, or service in a new market
- In addition to the website, increase brand awareness
- Improve, redesign, or create a new version of the current application
- Something else
- What category does your app fall into?
- gambling
- amusement
- E-commerce
- educate
- lifestyle
- utility
- travel
- other
- What are your financial and non-financial business goals?
- Financial goal: I want to get X% market share in Y months.
- Non-financial goals: I want to be rated as a best-in-class mobile app in the Apple App Store and Google Play Store by a certain date.
- What do you want your app to do?
- Describe the core functionality
- Deliver a unique value proposition
- Who are your direct and indirect competitors?
- Make a list of three to five of your main competitors in your niche (along with links)
- State the features you like and don’t like in your competitor’s products
- What is your product vision?
- For (your target users) (who need or want to change something), (the name of your mobile app) is a mobile app that will offer (killer features). Unlike (the current business model or competitors), my app will provide (the main advantages).
- Choose your monetization model:
- Paid advertising
- In-app purchases
- Freemium subscriptions
- Premium subscriptions
- Something else
Example of an app requirements document: User requirements
- Describe the user roles in your app:
- Guest/Regular/Paying User
- Buyer/Seller
- Client/Executor
- Students/Teachers
- Provider/Administrator
- Your classification
- Depending on the user role, consider the following criteria to create up to three possible user roles:
- Demographics (age, gender, family status, education level, type of job, location)
- Psychology (Pain Points, Goals, Needs, Important Issues, Attitudes, Motivations, Opinions)
- Market behavior (applications used, types of services/goods purchased, reasons for using applications or products or services purchased, solvency)
- Determine the preferences of your target users in the following areas:
- Device type: smartphone, tablet, desktop, smartwatch, smart TV
- Platforms: iOS, Android, cross-platform
- Describe the user journey:
- Sketch out a typical path that users take in your application to get the desired results
- Add a link to a possible API sketch
Example of writing an app requirements document: system requirements
- Describe the functionality you want your app to provide to users:
- List up to three must-have features
- Add a link to an example of what a specific feature looks like, if you have one
- What type of content do you want to add to your app?
- Video
- sonic
- animation
- Image
- RSS feeds
- other
- What services, servers, and databases do you currently use?
- What third-party applications, services, and databases does your application need to integrate with? (Payment gateways, social media, etc.)
- Which OS versions should your app be compatible with?
- Describe your user interface requirements:
- Mobile app style
- Color scheme
- logotype
- icon
- button
- Image
- font
- Link to the brand guidelines that your team needs to follow
- Do you have a current profile in the Apple App Store and/or Google Play Store?
- What hardware does your application need to sync with? (Wearables, drones, etc.)
- Describe your app’s quality standards, including:
- usability
- manifestation
- safe
- safe
- Other quality attributes
- What languages should your app be translated into?
How to write an app requirements document? Other needs
- What are the constraints and constraints that the team must work with?
- Business Rules
- Industry standards
- Government legislation
- Other possible limitations
- What is your project timeline and budget?
- When do you expect to start and finish the project?
- What is the approximate budget (USD) that you can allocate to the project?
- What services do you want your software development team to provide?
- Full-cycle mobile app development
- Web development
- Ongoing support and maintenance
- Promotions and marketing
- Interface design
- IT Consulting
- Additional services
How do I write a product requirements document for a mobile app? Once you have completed this briefing, email it to us and one of our managers will respond promptly. This brief will provide a solid foundation for creating a detailed mobile app product requirements document with the help of our team.
Have any questions about your mobile app project? Leave us a message.
A summary of sample app requirements documents
Even for the smallest projects, it’s important to have a common understanding of the initial requirements. In some cases, ready-made product requirements document templates can help you. But more often than not, they are only illustrative. Since no two applications are the same, no one else’s PRD is likely to fit your project.
To perfectly meet your specific tasks, you’ll need to create an original mobile app requirements document, which can be a time-consuming and tedious process. The good news is that you can leave it to the experts. Especially since they’re just a phone call away.
