- 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
Determining Overall Goals
"What is the goal of this redesign?" "Why are we redesigning?" "What will the redesigned site accomplish that the present site doesn't?" You need answers to these questions. Don't get sidetracked, though. You are not yet looking for the answer to "How are we going to redesign the site?" For now, you are seeking to identify specific goals. Review the Client Survey. What did the client list as goals? Were the goals specific or general? In conversation with the client, were any other goals mentioned? Pull these together into a concise list of overall goals.
Here are some possible client goals:
- To increase traffic
- To increase sales
- To highlight a new product
- To make a dynamic, content-driven site
- To decrease calls to customer service
- To create intuitive navigation
- To streamline browsing and purchasing
- To create a scalable structure for growth
What are goals, however, without a way to measure whether they have been reached? How will the client determine whether the site has met the stated goals upon launch? Are there methods in place for assessing return on investment (ROI)? Take your list of goals and sort them into primary, secondary, and tertiary priorities. Identify measurable ways in which you can determine whether these goals have been met postlaunch (for example, a statistical increase in purchase process completion). To determine the site's success, suggest that the client identify both measurable goals and milestones and do so both quantitatively and qualitatively. Redesigned sites should be able to compare statistics to the old site. Make a note of these measurable goals and revisit them in Phase 5: Launch when maintenance is readdressed.