These next series of entries tie together the patterns, principles, and techniques we use for our customer-centered design and explain them in the perspective of a complete web site design process. Our intention is to describe the general process that we use to create or update a web site. These techniques can help define what information we need to obtain from the client. They can also be helpful in impressing upon the client that we fully intend to meet their expectations and the needs of their target customers.

Don’t expect the design process to always run as smoothly in your own development projects as it is described in the next few entries. The process sometimes repeats phases and jumps back and forth, depending on the requirements of the client. You might find that the process presented here is not all-inclusive for your design teams because it doesn’t resolve all of your issues. In this respect, you may have to tweak the process to fit the needs of your own teams.

We always consider the people with whom we are working. For example, formal procedures might be an absolute necessity for larger teams, but this might not be the case for smaller teams. E-commerce design teams and art-centered design teams may require different techniques altogether. This is why we suggest that, at minimum, you should include the first four phases of development in your design process.

Seven Phases

The development of a Web site is broken down into the following seven phases.

1. Discovery
2. Exploration
3. Refinement
4. Production
5. Implementation
6. Launch
7. Maintenance

The First Four Phases

We refer to the first four phases as the design process. This part of the process emphasizes the overall Web site design and specifies which tasks the customers can perform and how they perform them. During this design process, each of the steps moves the design closer and closer to a Web site that is tailored specifically to the client’s needs.

Our design team makes presentations to the client at each of these stages to obtain approval for the work they have performed. In addition to these presentations, we communicate with the client on a regular basis to ensure that the team is on the right track. Always bear in mind that there are several parties that have a stake in the design process, including the client and their intended customers. The client is in charge, and our design team considers their requirements on a regular basis.

The Last Three Phases

Our design team does not necessarily perform these last three phases. In some cases, the design team hands off all documentation and interactive prototypes to another team at this stage. This new team may be a part of the client’s organization or it might be an entirely different third-party firm, which the client has engaged to finish the remainder of the work.

Detailed planning is not included at this stage of the process. We have two reasons for this:

• Each organization has procedures for handling issues such as scheduling, budgeting, and risk management. This makes the client the best candidate for performing such tasks.
• The process in this final stage is not linear. For example, a team might be in the Production phase, and discover that it needs to perform more Refinement activities. Another team may be in the Exploration phase and discover that they need to revisit the Discovery phase to revamp documents they created during that phase. Going backwards might be frustrating and seem like a personal defeat, but we always bear in mind that we are saving time and money by making these changes now rather than at a later time.

We hope that this overview gives you a glimpse into the development process. Future entries will discuss each of these phases in more detail, starting with the Discovery phase.