Steven Milanese

Without question, the discovery phase of development is an essential aspect of the development process. Perhaps the most essential aspect of development in the sense that it provides a footprint, from which the site’s framework will be planned, developed, deployed and if all goes to plan, eventually launched. The material covered in Web-Redesign 2.0, Workflow That Matters, covers and suggests the use of several documents during the discovery phase in an effort to help simplify and organize what can otherwise at times be a very difficult process.

During one of the videos the presentation touches on “Good vs. Red Flag Clients” or as we like to refer to them around the office, “The Craigs-listers”. To clarify, Craigslist.org is filled with advertisements placed by self-proclaimed web developers and graphic designers offering their “Professional Services” for obscenely low rates. As one should expect for this price, they are often less than skilled and in the worst of cases are unreliable con artists reselling someone else’s work, complete with a few false promises and plenty of bad advice. These “script-kiddies” will often sour the market in the sense that those who deal with them often have poor experiences and those who don’t look at the rates they are charging and develop a false perception of those rates being industry standard. This false perception of cost has only gotten worse in recent years thanks to dirt-cheap fill in the blank web solutions, like those currently offered by GoDaddy.com and Intuit. Because of this false perception, it is not at all uncommon for a prospective client to experience a sticker shock of sorts once they begin to meet with actual industry professionals and firms.

This was particularly the case for my partners and I, when we first opened our own firm. This caused to us re-evaluate the way in which we handle the process of the discovery phase. We started by recording a handful of what we then referred to as our “client interviews”. For several days, we reviewed the videos as well as any notes that were taken during our meetings with them. We paid especially close attention to the verbal description we provided the perspective client with of both the services we could offer them and the projects summary. We then looked at the videos and notes for what we had labeled the “successful” meetings for no reason other than they led to a sale. It was then that something stood out. In each case the clients that had decided to contract us had made several follow up calls and/or emails requesting clarification or expanded explanation of the topics we had covered during our meeting. It was then that we realized that while we had a taken the time to document everything on our end, the client was being provided nothing more than a verbal visual and a condensed project estimate / summary in the form of a follow up email.

When we first opened Down By The River, LLC. we set out to target small to mid-sized businesses in the hopes that we could help them develop their online real-estate in a way that allowed them to be competitive with their much larger real word competitors. It was during the early planning of our own internal process for handling the discovery phase that we made the mistake of assuming that these individuals we would be marketing our services to would be to busy to fill our paper work, or to be overwhelmed with the specifics of the project. Rather they would want to hire professionals that inspired the type of confidence in them that they could remain focused on their already overwhelming schedules. In retrospect, this was a tremendous miscalculation on our part to say the least. In hind site, we really needed to look no further than our own internal business practices for a real world example of what would be expected from business owners and decision makers. Along with the authority to make decisions on behalf of your business comes accountability. For that reason alone any responsible business person who has been entrusted with decision making responsibilities understands and appreciates the need to document everything. Overnight we developed a “Client Interview” form that was nothing more than a consolidated list of the questions asked during our taped client interviews. From there we decided we would also need to also provide a consolidated yet detailed summary of the data collected on those forms to the perspective client. We wanted this summary to communicate our understanding of their needs in a way that minimized any possibility of a miscommunication early on in the development process.

As a result of this course, I now know that in fact, what we did was create a comprehensive “client survey” and “communication brief” albeit we didn’t know it at the time. It is at times like this that I find myself envious of my fellow students who are only beginning their professional careers and will have the distinct advantage of having someone explain and demonstrate for them the valuable lessons that so many developers learned through trial and failure.

Another thing to keep in mind when handing over a client survey to a perspective client is although you might be asking the correct questions, there is no guarantee they’ll have the correct answers or in some cases any answer at all. In my professional experience, this tends to be the case more often than not when asking questions relating to their demographics. I laughed when the women in the Lynda.com videos made mention of the blank expression encountered when asking questions these types of questions, as I’m certain any experienced developer will attest, we’ve all been there at one point or another. While your first reaction to a clients lack of preparation in this regard might be to glance over this area, experience has taught us that this data is not only critical in terms of marketing but, is also an essential component to the successful development of a web site’s Graphic User Interface (GUI).

In order to develop a site that appeals to a specific demographic you need to understand more than just, what appeals to them visually. In fact, there are several factors to consider when compiling this type of preliminary demographic survey. When first evaluating the perspective client’s target audience I first look to identify the more obvious demographic markers, such as age, gender, and income. Once I have established this basic information I make an effort to look beyond the numbers at what our course materials refer to as “Psychographics” but I’ve always referred to as “the culture”.

Understanding the culture of your target audience is essential to developing a site that is going to appeal to their personality, values, attitude, and interests. Particularly on larger budget projects, I have found that when it comes to this aspect of project research, there is no substitute for first hand experience. With any of our larger clients we make it a point to go out into the field, not only to visit the client’s operation and staff. But, to meet with the people that use the product or service that our client sells. We want to meet first hand and listen to the experiences of those people that will be using the site once it has been developed. The expanded portion of this process is referred to in our course materials as “Contextual Inquiry”. I admittedly had no idea there were so many professional terms for these detailed processes.

“Contextual Inquiry” refers to the study of the users behavioral patterns, ie. their usage, loyalty factor and lifestyle. For our firm case we consolidated this aspect of the process into our study of the target audience’s culture, but absolutely acknowledge the importance of collecting and understanding this data as a fundamental component of the discovery process.

In the end, experience has taught me that there is no substitute for a well-defined project plan and there can be no hope of developing an effective plan without taking the time to do comprehensive research during the discovery phase.

References:
Lynda.com – http://www.Lynda.com
Video Course Title: Web ReDesign: Strategies for Success
Section 4. Communication
Time | Video Chapter Title:
10:43 Building a client survey
08:25 Communication brief
07:51 The art of estimation
04:49 Sample budgeting and pricing
02:11 Scope creep
02:22 Centralizing communication
02:34 The importance of time tracking

Section 6. Understanding Your Audience
Time | Video Chapter Title:
10:04 Three ways of understanding your audience

Godaddy, Inc. – http://www.godaddy.com
Intuit Inc. – http://www.intuit.com/
Down By The River, LLC. – http://www.DownByTheRiverLLC.com
“Web-Redesign 2.0, Workflow That Matters” by Goto and Cotler