Our Process – Phase One
Discovery
The discovery phase is a crucial first step for any web design or software development project. It includes the necessary research and analysis required to determine how the website, software or application can best serve the needs of the business and its customers.
During this requirements-gathering phase, we identify what the client wants to achieve, which leads naturally to understanding its users and their needs. These key requirements are then fleshed out with a technical analyses of integrations with legacy systems, support capabilities, and many other boundary-condition parameters. Researchers and user experience experts lead the effort in discovery, which may include stakeholder interviews, compiling a requirements matrix, developing user personas, as well as many other efforts described below.
Affinity Map
Affinity Mapping is a method of compiling and organizing data from each research method. Information from different participants are organized into topics in order to visually identify data sets that have agreement.
Analytics Review
An analytics review is an opportunity to explore existing web analytics data of a client’s current site or application. The process in which we analyze the behavior of your visitors based on existing configurations while also suggesting improvements for future tracking and reporting.
Content Inventory
A content inventory is both the process and result of cataloging and organizing the entire contents of a website, including html pages, metadata, images, video files, document files, etc.
Contextual Inquiry
Contextual Inquiry is a deeper form of ethnographic interview and observation. It is particularly useful for developing accurate scenarios – the stories of how users might interact with potential features.
Domain Strategy
The goal of this process is to identify all domains, subdomains, and major subdirectories that will contain all content and functionality.
Information Architecture
Information architecture is the practice of deciding how to arrange the sections and pages of your web content to be understandable. This leads into the strategy for a full site structure.
Requirements Matrix
A requirements matrix is based on conjoined efforts to ensure stakeholders are in agreement of the projects efforts, priorities, and scope during the initial planning phases.
Stakeholder Interviews
Stakeholder Interviews are simple, semi-structured interviews with key members in the client organization.
Technical Audit
A technical audit is an important step before embarking on a website rebuild. It involves discovering, documenting, and planning the existing custom development that needs to be done on the new website.
User Alignment
User alignment is the process of organizing and visualizing the goals and needs of stakeholders and users.
User Interviews
User interviews follow a structured methodology whereby the interviewer prepares a number of topics to cover and analyzes the conversation after the interview.
User Personas
User personas are fictional characters created to represent the types of users who could potentially interact with a website or product. American software engineer, Alan Cooper, is credited with pioneering the use of personas as “the single most powerful design tool”.
