In the previous entry, we presented an overview of the seven web site development phases. We discuss phase one – Discovery – in this entry.
Phase 1 – Discovery
During this phase, you and the Naviscent design team determine and clarify the scope of your project, your needs, and the needs of your intended customer base. We accomplish this together by analyzing whether a Web site is really the best solution for your goals. The result of this analysis is our development of the following three documents that we deliver to you by the end of the Discovery phase. We refer to the process of developing these documents as requirements gathering.

1. Customer analysis document. This document describes your target customers and their needs – for example, the type of people you are targeting, tasks they will perform on your site, technology tools they have at their disposal, and social issues that drive your target customers’ decision making.
2. Business analysis document. This document describes the business goals of your project.
3. Specification document. This document describes the features that the completed web site provides for you.

We break down this Discovery process into two steps, resulting in the creation of the aforementioned three documents.

Step 1: Determine the Overall Goals of the Web Site
In Step 1, we start with a questionnaire that both you and the Naviscent design team work together to answer. This must be done before the design team can begin to create or redesign your web site.

In our questionnaire, we may include questions such as:

• What value do you, the client, expect to provide to your customers?
• What value will the web site provide for you?
• What do you expect to accomplish with your site?
• What role does the site play in relationship to the rest of your company?
• What is your goal—to sell products online, promote products, educate, inform, provoke, communicate, provide a community?
• How will this web site further your goals?
• What is the focus of your web site?
• What are your reasons for wanting to build a site?

With your assistance, the questionnaire helps the design team to define the site. Issues to resolve include focusing on goals, high-level services for the target customers, and preliminary categories. These decisions become the foundation for the rest of the Discovery process.

At this Discovery phase, we may apply a number of additional techniques, including, but not limited to the following.

We maintain an ongoing dialog with you, the customer, to clarify what you expect.

The Naviscent design team always bears in mind that they are not the customer. This may seem obvious, but some web development companies employ design teams that become so absorbed in the design process that they forget about your needs. We show caution to prevent this from happening. We understand that the design team cannot rely only on their experience and intuition when building your web site. Your conception is foremost in the minds of our design team so that the outcome of your web site will meet your experiences and expectations, not that of the team.

We help to determine your target customers’ needs with the use of interviews, online and offline surveys, and focus groups.

Interviews
During the interview process, we use our techniques to explain your web site’s objectives and then proceed to gather information from the interviewees about what tasks they would like to see at your web site and to explore how they would like to perform those tasks. We may show design scenarios to them to harvest their opinions about the conceptualizations. These interviews often provide us with a lot of useful information to present to you that may affect your web design concept.

We pride ourselves on using proven techniques for the interview process, such as:

• Conducting the interview in a place that avoids distractions. We discourage the use of mobile phones and other distractions that would take away from the intended focus of the interview, which is your web site.
• Starting the process with easy questions and steadily progressing to ones that are more difficult. We feel that this puts the interviewees more at ease with us and so are more likely to be frank and comfortable with speaking to us.
• Asking open-ended questions that avoid yes or no answers. We find that doing so encourages the interviewees to talk about their thoughts in reference to the web site.
• Treating the interviewee without judgment or confrontation. Our job is not to judge or confront the interviewees. We are trying to learn how to make your web site fit your target audience.
• Listening to what they say with very little interruption. We do not consider these interviews to be conversations, and so, as such, we let the interviewees do most of the talking. We make note of anything important and write down follow-up questions, interrupting only when we need to clarify a point or if the interviewees begin to digress.

Offline and Online Surveys
We can offer offline surveys, online surveys, or a combination of both, depending on your needs. Offline surveys usually consist of a combination of in-person surveys, mail surveys, and the use of a market research firm to ask survey questions over the phone. Although effective, these techniques can be expensive and can take longer to yield results than their online survey counterpart.

You have several options available to you for online surveys. If you are planning to update your web site, we can add an online survey to your site. Additionally, we can deliver web-based surveys via e-mail or randomly, in floating windows, to visitors to your site.

Online surveys can quickly give you feedback from current customers about what they like and don’t like about your current site. We use a combination of multiple-choice and free form questions. Each has their advantage. Multiple-choice questions enable us to analyze the data quickly and easily. They also help your customers to move through the survey faster, thus making it more likely for them to complete the survey. Free-form questions enable customers to expand on what is right (and wrong) about your site. However, too many of these types of questions tend to discourage customers from finishing the survey.

Focus Groups
We have found that focus groups can be a good source of information, but are difficult to run well. We keep the focus group to a handful of people – six to twelve – who are representative of your web site’s target customers.

Our moderator asks questions about both your competitors’ web sites and your proposed web site. Specifically, if we are revising your web site, we will ask the group to discuss what they like and dislike about your current site, and what they like and dislike about your competitors’ sites. If we are creating a new web site for you, we will ask them the same questions about your competitors’ sites and your proposed web site.

Before we approach the focus group, we determine the information we need to acquire from them. This helps our moderators to stay focused on the topics that are most important to the development of your web site.

Considering the nature of people in groups, we try to follow certain rules that we have found work best with regard to focus groups.

• The moderator must moderate himself. Moderators that are too controlling can drive to group to conclusions that he wants to see. Our moderators make a concerted effort to let the members of the group offer their opinions without letting their own be known.
• The moderator must make sure that no one person dominates the group. An issue that arises too often with focus groups is that one individual stands out to dominate the group and as a result causes groupthink to emerge – meaning that the other members of the group will defer to his or her way of thinking. Our moderators are experienced with running focus groups; they know how to gracefully quiet the dominating member, enabling them to receive quality information from all members of the group.
• We run more than one focus group. The results that we receive from focus groups sometimes depend on the chemistry of the group. Results can range from very positive to very negative. For this reason, we run more than one focus group, with different types of people. Doing so gives us more information to work with and balances out emotional responses.
• When we gather our focus groups, we try to avoid professional respondents – Professional respondents are people who make money by going from group to group. These people are not necessarily representative of the group of people we need for your focus groups. We do not look for people who happen to be conveniently available. We try to find people who are genuinely interested in your product, and so are potential customers.

We find that focus groups are more useful in the beginning stages of web design because although these groups give us insight into your target customers’ attitudes and perceptions, they don’t give us much insight into what those customers will actually do in practice.

In the event that the project involves redesigning your existing web site, we evaluate your existing web site, and review and evaluate competitors’ web sites, to help differentiate your site from theirs.

We recruit some representative customers and observe what they say they need to do on your web site and on competitors’ web sites, what they actually do, and what steps they take to do it. From this observation, we make note of the types of mistakes they make when they perform specific tasks. We note and pay particular attention to comments they make about what they like and dislike about your site and competitors’ sites. If helpful at this point, we will ask them to fill out a questionnaire that will give us information about their demographics, their interests, and their subjective ratings.

In our next entry, we will discuss the second step in the discovery phase.