Development Process
Years of experience show us how important it is to involve you, the customer, in the development process. Once we establish your goals for the website, I can provide you with several options to help achieving those goals. The processes below are just some of the ways of gathering information that makes your project successful.Identify Customers
Knowing your customers and users is vital to your site's success.
- Who are they? Are they soccer moms, engineers, teens, a more mature audience, etc.?
- How familiar are they with technology?
- What are their expectations?
- How easy is your site for them to read and understand?
Clear answers to these questions are absolutely essential for your website to achieve your goals.
Usability Testing
Now that we know who the users are, we need to know more about them:
- What are they looking for?
- What are their goals?
- How do they behave?
- How do they interact with your site?
Knowing this helps you make better decisions about what users want or need in order to accomplish a task on your site.
Usability testing involves observing your customers to learn what they do and how they feel while using your website. Everything from body language (drumming fingers on the desktop, furrowed brows) to subconscious utterances ("hmm", "umm") works together to illustrate what's happening in the users' minds.
Usability testing is a one-on-one process where a test facilitator observes and interacts with the test participant. Individual testing and analysis achieve more useful results than large focus groups, which usually reflect only the loudest and most opinionated person in the group.
Prototyping
This is an iterative process where several versions of your site are presented. Each iteration is a more and more faithful rendering of your site. It can start with something as modest as a hand drawing on a piece of paper, but the final version at the end of the development process is a finished, working website.
Development
Having collected data through customer identification, usability testing, and prototyping, we are now ready to assemble this information and build the actual website.
Testing
Usability testing is only the first of many testing phases throughout the development process. Later on, functional testing ensures that all aspects of the website do what they're supposed to do.
Surveys
Surveys are no substitute for true usability testing, but they are still great for gathering additional information about your users, what they'd like to see on your website, or anything else you'd like to know.