Previously, we discussed step 1 of the Discovery phase – determining the overall goals. In this entry, we discuss step 2 of the Discovery phase – up-front value proposition, and site branding. We also discuss the resulting three documents that the Naviscent design team develops for you.

Step 2: Decide on the Web Site’s Up-Front Value Proposition and Other Key Elements

Up-Front Value Proposition
Up-Front Value Proposition is one of the most important patterns in this step. This pattern, basically, is the theme that unifies the site. The following figure gives examples of value propositions from existing web sites.

On your site’s home page and throughout the site, we emphasize your site’s value proposition. Doing so communicates the purpose of your site and presents a clear promise about what your site has to offer. Naviscent considers the home page to be the introduction and therefore an advertisement for your site. We understand that it must promise, and deliver, on the unique benefits that your site offers. It must grab your target customers in a way that will make them want to explore, use, possibly make purchases from, and visit again.

Our goal for your value proposition is to explain the web site’s value to someone in a single sentence. Everything on your web site pivots around this single idea; it is the unifying theme that ties your site together. This is why we work with you to think through your site’s value proposition carefully. We might make many drafts before deciding on the best one for your new web site. If you have an existing web site, you may want to reconsider your current value proposition. Our design team can help you with that, also.

Our experience has shown that the following are the concepts we need to present to your target customers:

• A persuasive promise for what your web site delivers
• A unique offering that only your company can provide
• Descriptive wording and images that your target customers can understand easily and quickly

The following figure illustrates how a clear value proposition results in a positive impression.

Site Branding
In addition to the value proposition, we include site branding to help build the identity of your web site. Naviscent believes that site branding is much more than just a logo or a tagline. It makes your target audience view your web site in a certain manner. For example, do you want your target customers to view your site as exciting and fun, or maybe as reliable and trustworthy? Site branding pattern exercises help you and Naviscent’s design team to decide what kind of impression you want to deliver to your target customers.

The brand that your company builds will depend on the audience that you want to reach, and the values that they deem important. Our experience and research has shown that your target customers will assess your web site based on the following five criteria.

1. Content of quality. Does the site provide what I want?
2. Ease of use. Can I find what I’m looking for in a simple and efficient manner?
3. Performance. Is the site fast, or is it slow and sluggish?
4. Satisfaction. Is my overall experience pleasant and satisfactory, or does it leave me feeling like I’ve wasted my time?
5. Brand value. Does the site provide something important and unique, or is it similar to hundreds of other web sites?

The following figure illustrates many of the factors that must intertwine to create a good branding statement.

Personalization
We also consider whether personalization is important to your site. This element tailors web pages to individuals or groups. For example, would showing a customer’s name on your web site be important to your target customers? How about your web site remembering a mailing address that your customer entered previously?

Internationalization
This element considers international target customers. Do you expect target customers from different countries to use your web site? If so, there are many issues you and the design team need to consider such as, currency, icons, layout, and color.

Discovery Deliverables
At the end of the Discovery phase, the Naviscent design team produces three documents: the customer analysis document, the business analysis document, and the specification document.

Customer Analysis Document
This document gives you and Naviscent’s design team a deeper understanding of your web site’s target customers. It describes the target customers, their characteristics, their needs and their tasks. We include the following details in this report:

• The target customers’ motivation to visit your web site. You and the design team must have a clear understanding of what motivates your target customers to visit your web site. This information is important because if the design team doesn’t offer a clear, persuasive description to your target customers about what you are offering on your web site, customers may leave your site before they even look at what you have to offer.
• A task analysis of the target customers. This analysis describes the people who will visit your site, the tasks they perform, the technologies they use, and their organizational issues.

Business Analysis Document
In this document, the Naviscent design team describes your business needs and the business goals of the web site. It explores how your goals tie in with your customers’ goals and tasks. For example, suppose that your intranet site is the primary source for company information and forms. What does this goal mean to an employee who is trying to find a company form to requisition office supplies required to do his or her job?

We usually include the following elements in the business analysis document.

• Business plan. The business plan describes your needs and the business goals of the web site. Some examples of goals might be to bring in new business by enabling purchases online at your new web site, or to bring in new customers by providing online information about your products and services.
• Competitive analysis. This analysis looks at your competitors’ web site features. We identify which features are important to target customers, and which are not. We also discuss the competitive advantages of your web site over similar web sites.
• Metrics for success. How will we measure success for both your business and your competitive goals? For example, how many customers does your site need to draw on a regular basis in order to stay in business? How many will be repeat customers? How many visitors will become paying customers?

Specification Document
We also refer to this document as the requirements document. This document identifies what the web site should provide to your target customers when the Naviscent design team is finished. It describes web site functionality and the system constraints. At this point, the design team does not concern itself with how they will achieve the functionality, but only on what they will accomplish. The specification document may contain the following elements.

Project description
This element of the document describes the common purpose and ultimate goals of the project, from both your perspective and your target audience’s perspective. The Naviscent design team gathered this information during step one of the Discovery phase.

List of tasks, scenarios, and storyboards
These three elements flesh out the features and tasks that your web site will offer, which the design team begins to develop during step one of this phase. The design team forms the basis for evaluations of your proposed web site on these elements, which we summarize for you here:

• Tasks are the specific goals that your target customer wants to accomplish on your web site, such as finding the best price for and then purchasing a particular product. The more complex your web site, the more tasks the Naviscent design team will need to develop. For example, a simple web site design may contain ten to twenty complete tasks, but a more complex web site will require many more. At this stage, we label each task as easy, moderate, or difficult to give you and the design team a better idea about the complexity of the design process.
• Scenarios are context-rich stories that the Naviscent design team develops about potential target customers—their characteristics, the tasks they need to accomplish, and the context of their use of your site. These stories focus more on what target customers will do on your site, rather than how they will do them at this point in the design process. The Naviscent team uses these scenarios to help them know and understand the type of target customers who might visit your site. This information helps the team to decide between different ways of carrying out a design. For example, during the design process, they may ask whether your target customers would order business gifts for colleagues from your site. If the answer is no, then the design team knows that offering this type of feature on your web site would be irrelevant.
• Storyboards are a sequence of web pages that the design team creates to give a general idea about how a target customer would complete a specific task. A storyboard can take many forms—the design team may sketch them from hand, or create them using software tools, and when appropriate to the project, the team may include photographs.

Comprehensive list of proposed features
This section lists all proposed features and sub-features, and classifies them in importance as “must have,” “should have,” or “could have.” To gather this information, the design team uses competitive comparisons of similar web sites, target customer surveys, and other market research techniques, such as focus groups. Each feature includes a description on how the design team will evaluation or test it in the final web site design.

Overall design goals
This section lists general design goals that the design team needs to incorporate into your final web site. These goals may include decreasing the time the it takes your target customers to make purchases and to check out from the shopping cart, reduce the number of mistakes your target customers make if you already have an existing site, or making the web site faster for your target customers to use.

Metrics
This section measures whether the design team has reached their specified goals and requirements, such as keeping download time to less than a specified number of seconds for the majority of your target customers. The design team discusses, in general terms, how they will measure each of the listed features in the final web site design.

With these three documents in hand, we can move forward into the next development phase: exploration, which will be the subject of our next entry.