Process

Target Market Analysis

• Facilitate brainstorming session with business owner to identify target audience, audience goals and expectations, client goals and expectations, possibilities, and priorities
• Deliver resulting prioritized list of requirements to client in Functional Specification document, with future enhancements identified and grouped in “Future Phases” document.
• Deliver Technical Specification document and Contingency Plan (if required)

Competitive Analysis

• Research competitor sites for content, tools, features
• Identify general usability challenges with existing site (content density, call to action placement, number of decisions, amount of whitespace, menus, etc)
• Report on findings, making recommendations based on best practices and competitive sites

Demographics Matrix

Define a statistical sampling of targeted audience demographics. These may include gender, age, education level, income level, physical location, internet use, marital status. Generate a matrix of the percentage representation based on Target Market Analysis audience definition — to be used in recruiting for the Focus Group and Usability Studies

Recruiting

We recruit Focus Group and Usability Study participants to fill all percentages in the demographic matrix. so all are demographic categories are represented. We then follow up with recruited participants to ensure a high turnout, providing details for them attending the Focus Group and Usability Study.

Focus Group Facilitation

• Input: questions to be answered, 100+ words for ranking and sorting, designs to be discussed
• Output: user goals, feature recommendations (tools), content organization / sorting cluster analysis (menu), content ranking analysis (calls to action), focus group discussion summary, video tapes of focus group session

Usability Studies

• Input: scenario script, survey
• Output: usability report (trends), results of survey, prioritized website recommendations, videotapes of usability study sessions.

Business owners come to us to help with websites that maybe has served them well in the past, just does not any more.  Perhaps the promised traffic is not showing up.  Perhaps, to save money, the business owner decided to ‘just put something up there’.  Perhaps the business has simply outgrown the original purpose.

This is a summation of some of the most common:

 

The Designer Site

SO many times I come across sites that  are absolutely beautiful.  So beautiful to look at — definitely eligible for a design award.  But they don’t DO anything!  The customers come to the site and ‘oooo’ and ‘aaahhh’, but when it comes down to it, they don’t know what to do, and so they leave.  And they never come back.  Because the next person down in the google search result list spoke to THEM and make them feel welcome.

Who were those sites designed for?

The designer.

Except, the designer is not your customer.

The Owner Site

Other sites I encounter are INCREDIBLY informative.  Lots of terms and processes and awards won and history and…..  SO much great information!  Acronyms thrown all over the place.  Very important people who’ve done very important things.  So very impressive.

So, who were those sites designed for?

The business owner.

Except the business owner is not your customer either.

The 1990s Site

Blinking text.  Flash animation.  Impossible to read text on mobile devices.  Your online presence is a reflection of your business — make sure you bring it to modern times.

The Novice Site

Enough said.

Once we see web traffic through tools such as Google Analytics (as well as other web-traffic statistic generation tools), we determine if there are changes we might make to elevate the user experience.  Using Google Analytics, we can see how users travel through a website, and make recommendations and additions based on the goals of the organization and how users are actually interacting with this site.  Sometimes we generate surveys.  Sometimes we do A/B testing and make modifications based on results.  Sometimes we talk to the customer to get their first-hand observations.

Targeted Software Development

Our staff is available for projects of many sizes, developing in a wide array of languages, including JAVA, JavaScript, XML, Perl, PHP, C, C++, Visual Basic, VB Script, (and yes, even COBOL!) over different platforms (Linux/Unix, Windows) and web browsers (Internet Explorer, Netscape, Mozilla, Opera, Safari, Chrome)

• Strong Methodology Focus: Goal and Objective Setting, Requirements Gathering, Analysis, Design, Development, Testing, Implementation, Documentation, Training
• JAD, SCRUM, and Agile Development — keeping the whole team involved in an efficient way, resulting in a solid end product
• Content Management System Development – experts in Drupal, Magento, WordPress, DotNetNuke, puts content control in YOUR hands and adds makes adding new features a breeze
• E-Commerce Development – developed from ground-up through packaged solutions, to sell your products and services online
• Database application development (i.e. Product Catalogs, Calendar/Event Management, Reservations, Web Form Management) using SQL/MySQL, Oracle and Sybase
• Ajax, jQuery, Flash Development, including extensive Action Script development, to bring graceful movement to your site.

Ongoing Support

FiveSecondTest, Loop11, online surveys, A/B testing, follow-up usability studies and benchmarking, website statistics analysis, etc are what we can do to ensure your site stays active and relevent