Yes… Your Project Needs a Discovery Process

Would you build a house without a blue print? Would you buy a car without test driving it? Did you ever write a book report without reading the book? Ok… so maybe you cut corners and used Cliff’s Notes… but you probably received a “C” on that one. The point is, in order to build a successful website, research is required at many different levels to accurately identify your marketplace and online objectives.

Every project at O3 begins with a discovery process. This can be amazingly tedious and time consuming… but it’s always thoroughly rewarding. We look at stats… and more stats… and the stats of those stats. We interview clients… and tech guys… and marketing directors… and moms and dads and brothers and sisters. And for some reason, it always seems to end around 10pm on a Friday. It’s exhausting. It’s also the most valuable service we offer our clients.

Most of our clients are too close to their brands. They are on the inside looking out, and the view from that bubble is often times distorted. That’s not to say they don’t know what they want… they just may not realize what they actually need. These days, Web development is complicated. While there are a million cousin’s brother’s buddies out there who can whip up a Wordpress blog from the bowels of their basement, too often they are not doing the legwork necessary to consider the business or organizational objectives of building the site in the first place.

Design and technical considerations should be the result of a clearly defined set of goals, strong planning and thorough research. We can’t create an effective site strategy without first having a deep understanding of the user base, the competitive landscape and the larger business objectives. Also, the site itself is only a piece of a much larger puzzle that may include everything from SEO to email marketing to social media and offline strategy. While we constantly have to fight prospective clients on the value of discovery, it is amazingly insightful… and the results are rarely what we thought they would be.

We recently completed a 20 page creative not-so-brief for a new client. It included a usability review, stats analysis (both Google analytics and form results), interviews and competitive analysis of 4 major entities. The results were intriguing, and we encountered a dozen or so revelations during the process.

For example… while the client assumed their women’s demographic had been declining, what we found was something entirely different. Statistical analysis proved that of the services they provided, their Women’s Services page topped the charts in both page views and visits, and it was continuing to trend in that direction. And yet, interviews with front-line personnel and online submissions proved that women were in fact contacting our client less and less.

So the question had to be asked, why is this happening? Where and why is the site failing to convince these women to contact our client? What can we do to change the result?

In the end, our discovery process serves as a road map for success. It helps us define and support design and content decisions. In this case, we have recommended a more streamlined, conversational content approach and several “user flow” modifications that the new design will take into account. That is, the content on the Women’s Services page will speak more to their needs. And the flow of the site will never leave the user asking “Okay, now how do I get in touch?” Again, this is only one of a dozen or so real life usability and content issues that we as designers and marketers needed to uncover. Without thorough research, this would have been impossible to plan for. Once these issues are discovered and defined, we can then begin architecting the site and campaign specifics around them.