Whether the website is new or currently live, I start with discovering all the details of the project.
These tasks will help later with information architecture and user experience design.
I define the project's concept and the business goals through requirements gathering, functional specifications, and design strategies.
Whether the website is new or currently live, I start with discovering all the details of the project. For a new website, a conceptual design document will detail questions such as:
I research the target audiences and determine user goals for the project to help create user experiences that work well. Generational studies and marketing surveys give a high-level understanding, while analytics provides a more focused understanding on the when, where and how the user visits the website.
In general, user research helps provide insight into fulfilling brand emotions, creating a clear user experience, and building successful marketing campaigns. Personas, which document a name, face and short description about fictitious individuals, provide a representation of the target audiences. Each persona focuses on a specific scenario in which the website becomes the solution to one of their problems. This helps to solidify the exact steps and conditions for building a pleasant user experience as well as identify key pain points in existing websites.
Understanding competitors not only helps with securing a niche market, but also understanding the current mental models of potential visitors. A mental model describes how people would think in a certain situation. Most likely the same, or similar, audiences are used by competitors as well as the current website. Therefore, those same people are used to doing things a certain way. Changing navigation or a user experience too much could result in confusion and a loss of trust.
