Success Criteria

Introduction¶

Establishing success criteria is essential for your digital solutions project because it gives clear goals and measurable benchmarks for evaluating the effectiveness and quality of your solution.

Success criteria are used to:

• Guide decision-making throughout the problem-solving process, especially you are evaluating components and the overall solution.

• Ensure solutions meet the user needs and technical requirements you identified during the exploration phase.

• Enable ongoing testing and refinement by helping you improve your work based on clear expectations.

• Provides a basis for justified recommendations and informed judgments about the solution’s performance and impact.

Using success criteria means you can determine whether their digital solution is functional, user-friendly, and has a positive personal, social, and economic impact. This helps you stay focused, reflect critically, and communicate their results effectively.

Requirements table¶

Solution requirements are the specific needs and constraints that must be addressed when creating a digital solution.

These requirements typically include:

• Functional requirements: What the solution must do (e.g. store user input, display search results).

• Non-functional requirements: How the solution performs (e.g. speed, accessibility, appearance).

• User experience requirements: How the user interacts with the solution (e.g. ease of use, mobile compatibility).

• Constraints: Limitations such as time, tools, platforms, or available data.

From the project’s stimulus, empathy maps, personas and use case diagram, you should be able to identify these requirements. Before we develop success criteria, we need to prioritise these requirements. For that we will use a MuSCoW table.

MuSCoW table¶

A MoSCoW table is a way to prioritise solution requirements by grouping them into four categories:

• Must

• Should

• Could

• Won’t.

It helps you to focus on what’s truly necessary; allows you to manage time and resources effectively and supports clear communication with stakeholders (ie. your teacher).

Layout

Structure your MuSCoW table with each priority horizontal. Then list the the requirements in the appropriate priority category. See the example below.

Success Criteria¶

We now need to write out success criteria. Success criteria are important in digital solutions projects because they:

• Define what success looks like — they give a clear target for the project to aim for.

• Guide development — help developers make decisions that stay focused on user needs.

• Support testing and evaluation — provide measurable goals to check if the solution works.

• Improve communication — ensure everyone (students, teachers, stakeholders) understands what is expected.

• Enable reflection and refinement — make it easier to identify what’s working and what needs fixing.

You should write criteria for all the requirements with the Must and Should priorities.

Writing Success Criteria¶

To write a success criteria for a requirement, describe how you will know the requirement has been met. It should be specific, measurable, and testable.

1. Start with the requirement

   • e.g. “The solution must allow users to upload images.”

2. Decide how to measure success

   • What evidence proves it works?

   • e.g. “User can upload an image file (JPG/PNG) and see a preview.”

3. Write the success criteria clearly

   • e.g. “Users can successfully upload a JPG or PNG image, which is displayed within 2 seconds.”

   Good success criteria are:

• Clear: Easy to understand

• Testable: You can check if it’s met

• Relevant: Tied to the requirement

Layout

Structure your Criteria table with each requirement having it’s own row. Then write the corresponding criteria in the right-hand column. See the example table below: