Setting Site Goals
Competitive analysis
Who is your competition? what are they doing well that you would like to incorporate in your site? What are you doing better than they are? A good analysis of your competition can help you conceive relevant focus group questions.
Identify primary and secondary audiences
Example The main goal of your site is student recruitment. Currently, your students have SAT scores of 925-1025.You want to attract students whose SAT scores are 1000 and above.
Focus Groups and Interviews
At this point, it's invaluable to do some focus group research or interviews with your primary audience so you know what to focus on and to assess some web development criteria.
Example Student X is your dream candidate. What other schools are they looking at? What are the determining factors in their school choices? Sit down with your audience (at their computers if possible) and look at your website and your competition's websites with them. Note (even better, video!) how they surf, what they're looking for and how hard or easy their areas of interest are to find on your site and your competitors sites. Are you redesigning the look and feel of the site? If so, ask questions about what kind of imagery, design and writing they find inviting and what turns them off.
From this research you'll develop a user profile.This unifying document can save you countless hours and angst down the road when your web team is debating how to do things based on their own personal perspectives.
User Profile Questions
User Profile Example
Online surveys and asking for feedback
A cheap and quick method is an online survey (example) or request for feedback.
When asking for feedback: Use language carefully! On one site I worked on we put a link saying "send us your suggestions," and got almost 100% critical feedback--what they thought should change on the site. When we changed the link text to "send us your feedback" we got the full range of responses: compliments, criticism and neutral comments.
Identify goals Now that you've prioritized the audience, what do you want for or from them? In the above example, we want a specific type of student to apply. This should go into your project documentation for future reference. As internal and external team members come up with too many great ideas for the site, you can check against the project goals to see if it's a "phase 1" (in the above example, an on-horizline application would be phase 1-critical to accomplishing your goal), "phase 2" (providing prospective students with profiles and contact info of current students--may be something you'll start working onafter you get the site up) or "phase 3" (an online tour of your building(s) could wait until after phase 1 and 2 objectives are accomplished).
On the UIUC site redesign our goals were
- Represent the breadth and excellence of the campus -what do we do, what we value
- Make helpful content available- improve site usability, organization, and quality of content
- Introduce useful features-search, maps, calendar, "Explore Illinois"
- Establish a feedback loop-to lay the groundwork for future improvement
- Improve ADA compliance
When you get to the design and production phases, what technical constraints will you work within? In other words, what monitor resolution will you use as your target? What level of backwards browser compatability will you aim for? How about cross-platform? How much do you worry about download time and will your site be ADA compliant? This unifying document can save you countless hours and angst down the road when your web team is debating how to do things based on their own computer settings.
The following tools will help you draft your HTML standards
- webstats
- focus group research and
- online survey for site visitors to fill out (feel free to use the survey tool)
Get Approval
If a boss or client is signing off on your site, now is the time to involve them. Make sure they're in agreement with the goals, and are aware of the audience's needs and preferences.If they are focusing on a different "primary" audience you want to know it now so you can readjust before you head down the wrong path. If they're a different market segment than their users (i.e. administrators vs. 17 year olds), now is the time to educate them about the user's reactions and preferences. I've seen clients become advocate for designs that were completely antithetical to their personal preferences -- because they were involved in doing the focus group research and reading and writing the reports. Since we'd documented what effective communication was for our target audience, individual taste became secondary and the committee could focus on what the audience was responding to, not what we all responded to.
Deliverables
Competitive Analysis
Site Goals
User Profile
HTML Standards and Design Specs Stakeholder signoff
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