Branding and Communication Goals for Content-Intensive Interactive Applications

Requirements engineering has traditionally focused on identifying functional and non functional requirements to inform design, and to ensure that the product under development accommodates the needs of the end users, the goals of the different stakeholders, as well as the technological, organizational, and business constraints. For requirements analysis of content-intensive interactive applications, we propose to take a wider perspective driven by the concepts of brand, brand value, and communication goal. We highlight the pervasive impact of this kind of "non functional requirements" on various design dimensions of content-intensive interactive applications - contents, lay-out, information architecture, interaction, services - in order to create not only a functional or informative experience, but also an emotional relationship with the artifact and the brand underneath it. The paper discuss a case study to exemplify our approach, sets the founding elements for brand&communication-driven requirements analysis in content-intensive interactive applications, and provides a modeling framework for representing the results of this process.