Here is an interesting post on requirements, which questions the concept of “requirements” and its hypothesis nature. I can’t stop linking here to Death of My Space because of bad user experience

In our usual requirements-driven design and development process, we often don’t include user experience in the requirement writing process which often results in rewrites of the requirements. UX helps to catch mistakes early in the design process. The early you catch the mistake, the lower the cost to fix it.

We all have heard stories in our childhood, we do tell stories even now. It’s natural for us. Stories help to gather and communicate information, communicate design ideas, encourage collaboration and sharing, and create a sense of purpose.There is value in storytelling and value in visually communicate what your website/application does than just describing it. It removes the ambiguity. Rather than writing reams of requirement, storyboard is a good way to nail the requirements by illustrating walk-throughs of the application.

Here is an example of validating requirements by storyboarding.

First I nailed the design flow, which was used for extracting requirements. Storyboard is a good way to nail the requirements rather than writing reams of requirements through feature analysis.

Ideally, Lo-fi Prototype could be taken as the basis for generating stories and which is also useful for validating user requirements from users perspective through usability testing. The storyboard/lo-fi prototype helps in generating information architecture which would in turn help technical experimentation to validate assumptions about scope and complexity and get an early view of feature requirements. These are rapid and highly iterative in nature.

Requirements should not exist just for the sake of having it, but should add value to users and business.