Try before you buy

This has to have been the most tiring January I've ever experienced. The dark mornings, coupled with a regular battles with various family colds and viruses, means it feels to have lasted an age!

For me the only plus side of this has meant we've had, what feels like, a good amount of time on the discovery phase of our website project. Despite us having a strict budget and delivery timescale spending this time researching the scope of the project is essential.

Primarily this is to ensure we don't only focus on deliverables but objectives. In this modern business landscape our website needs to do so much more than just be a shiny online brochure. We require it to drive real business intelligence and goals. The more it can be used to either increase leads or conversions the more we do to earn our seat at the top table! It becomes an essential tool in driving the strategic goals of the business forward.

It's all about the users!
By spending time with our users we can ensure the site is built for their needs. This makes decision making much easier as it gives us the focus and context we need. So what is the best way to go about this?
  • Organisational structure - No-one can ever excel at work without an understanding of how their business is setup. Learn who the key stakeholders are early so you can bring them on board and speak to them 
  • Stakeholder interviews - Pick the brains of the CEO, managing directors and other senior staff on the vision and business KPIs. Customer services have knowledge about common queries/pain points and it’s fascinating to see the tools they have (or don’t have) at their disposal to help customers.
  • Internal document review - There can be a wealth of documentation present within the business's archives. Strategy documents, marketing documents (i.e. old brochures), roadmaps and objectives. Some of these will be useful, some not.
  • Existing research - We recently carried out some client perception research. This is a great resource to use to validate our findings against and gain extra insight.
  • Desk research - By looking at existing Google analytics data we can identify if there are any obvious drop offs in the journey. Looking at our social media channels also gives us a good steer alongside insights from industry whitepapers.
  • User research - This allows us to connect with the user and their needs. It offers so much more than we can get from our analytics and personas.
  • Contextual research - I've blogged before on the importance of getting out into the business. Without experiencing our service first hand it's almost impossible to draw any conclusions. 
  • Competitor analysis - This is in equal parts therapeutic and scary! Seeing what you deem as a below par competitor website can give you extra impetus to make yours even better. Similarly, noting how they have decided to articulate their business online gives you an idea of the role the website plays in their strategy.
In analysing this data it's essential the entire team is involved and full transparency is employed. You can then start to sketch out the service as you understand it from your various research.

Rather than feeling like a delay taking the time to map these tasks allows us as clients . In treating it like a separate project with clear deliverables we can try out the working relationship with the agency with minimum commitment. By involving some initial prototyping it gives us a great idea of where the chosen agency can take us.

All of this has taken place through a January fog of an extreme reluctance to get out of bed in the morning. This might in part be due to two domestic changes we've recently made in purchasing a Leesa mattress and switching energy supplier to Bulb. The latter meaning we've been more relaxed about keeping the heating on! I'd highly recommend both and Leesa also allow a 'discovery phase' of an 100 day money back trial...
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