Increasingly my mentor, Judy has been working on a better way to collect functional needs from users (who are not developers or implementers) and she is looking to find out if there is a better way to collect their user needs. She thinks the best is paper but it's difficult when users are scattered across continents.

Thus we are looking for feedback on the following questions

What tools do you use for collecting user needs?
What are the actual tasks you need to do to collect functional needs from users?
What re the challenges/barriers for using these tools?
What can be better?

Kindly answer these questions and help us serve our users better.

Thanks and regards
Sreekavitha