- Gathering Information
- Understanding Your Audience
- Analyzing Your Industry
- Understanding Discovery
- Determining Overall Goals
- Preparing a Communication Brief
- Creating a Project Plan
- Setting the Budget
- Creating Schedules
- Assigning Your Project Team
- Setting Up Staging Areas
- Planning for User Testing
- Kicking Off the Project
- Phase 1 Summary
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
Phase 1 Summary
The kick-off meeting signifies the end of the first phase of our Core Process. Your project has been organized, approved, scheduled, budgeted, staffed, and kicked-off. Defining the scope of a redesign project, as we have shown in this chapter, involves a great deal of legwork and a huge amount of planning. After reading through this, the longest chapter in this book, you may be questioning the effort. Why spend the time? Why poll the client so extensively? Why not simply take the information the client provides to the team and work with that?
Data. The more data you have at the outset, the better you will set the stage for your redesign project. The Client Survey alone contains more than 30 questions. The Expanded Tech Check worksheet, the Maintenance Survey, and all the tools presented in this chapter are designed to help you gather the information you need for your redesign project.
A project that is clearly defined establishes several points of reference, including the tone and the overall goals for the redesign. By making these known to all team members as well as to the client, you have ensured that everyone is working with the same assumptions and terminology; everyone sees the same finish line. Also high in importance, you have defined your target audience(s) and their needs. You know all about their online habits and their technical capabilities. At each step in every phase that follows — Structure, Design, Build, Launch — the entire team must work at redesigning for the end user. But if you don't understand your audience… Enough said. Only after defining the project can you begin hands-on site development.
Structuring the site, the second phase of the Core Process, begins right on the heels of the kick-off meeting. Armed with defined goals and specified direction, you will begin to design the site's information and address site content.
Phase 1 Check-Off List
Discovery
Distribute/collect/analyze the Client Survey
Distribute/collect/address the Maintenance Survey
Collect existing marketing and research materials from the client
Identify audience demographics
Create audience profile(s)
Identify the audience's technical capabilities
Identify backend programming needs (if any exist, employ additional workflow)
Analyze your industry (see also Chapter 10)
Clarification
Determine overall goals
Prepare a Communication Brief
Planning
Set your budget
Establish a means of time tracking
Create schedules
Assign your project team
Set up a client staging site
Set up an internal team development area
Plan for user testing (see also Chapter 8)
Assemble your Project Plan
Have a kick-off meeting
Get client signatures on all documents