Whether you’re working with an external web design agency or handling a website redesign internally, doing some version of discovery can help smooth the way for a happier team, a smoother redesign process and a better, longer-lasting outcome.
Why the Learn and Discover Phase Matters
To create a website that can grow with your brand, It’s vital for those involved to understand your industry, competition, and end-user needs. By assessing your current state (where you are now) and future state (where you want to be) people can collaborate, connect the dots and create a dynamic website that works for achieving your goals.
Aligning Objectives
Alignment on a website’s purpose and goals is essential. This can include how the website should look and feel along with how it should function—the goal of the site, the desired user journeys. If alignment is skipped, your website could end up fractured or you’ll set your team up for seemingly endless rounds of edits because goals weren’t clarified well enough or soon enough.
Building a Knowledge Base
Seeking to understand a brand inside and out helps us strategize with our clients. Knowing your audience—what they want, need, and look for, helps your brand become the solution. Investigating competitors gives us a sense of your industry and allows us to build on your differentiation with site structure and messaging.
Setting the Stage for Cohesion
Making room for discovery can prevent wasted time during design and development, and allows space for members of your team to have a say. A brand can be more cohesive if the culture is accounted for. Discovery sets the stage well, and helps cut down on misunderstandings and misrepresentations of the brand, stakeholders and ultimate goals.
Our Learn and Discover Process
When we are hired for a website redesign, we play the long game. Our goal for our clients? Lay the groundwork with learning and discovery to ensure they won’t have to redesign their website again in a just few years. Together we create a roadmap for each brand to follow as they grow and oversee new iterations of their services and offerings. Our holy grail is helping brands grow for years to come (including through our Digital Growth™ Marketing program) after a website redesign is complete—starting with a website that represents a brand well.
Research
When we’re ready to collaborate with a marketing team and company stakeholders, we dive into research. Knowing your current stats makes creating a game plan much easier. For example, knowing what is currently working and what’s not. Know what’s most bothering various stakeholders – whether the marketing team, an HR manager or sales people – helps us decide where to focus.
Typically, companies come to us because their website is misaligned with their current brand. The more information we can get, the better we’re able to guide marketing teams. So we look at current initiatives, objectives and expectations, along with KPIs to determine how you’re measuring success. In addition, we also look for opportunities—through a competitor analysis, content review, and assessing SEO performance.
Interviews
We always like to base our recommendations and strategy off of real insights. Interviews of stakeholders and customers are both wildly helpful for getting an inside (and outside) look for a company.
As a relatively neutral third-party, we are able to talk to both groups to get the feedback that provides the foundation for current brand perception, future website needs, and the barriers or pain points of the current purchase process. By hearing from a variety of stakeholders, we can continue the idea of brand cohesion with the insight we gather. By talking directly to your current customers, we can fill in the blanks on the journey, purchase barriers, and emotional connection and motivations of a customer in general—which can help us create website content that not only identifies the pain points, but solves them.
Technical Analysis
For every beautiful website redesign, there are a host of technical aspects that must be considered. In talking with the company’s IT stakeholders, we can identify what’s working and what isn’t, what kind of integrations will need to be put in place for new website functionalities, and how best to migrate existing content, if any. Looking at the backend helps us ensure everything is set up for success.
SEO Analysis
We’re here to help brands build on what they have and prepare for more growth. So, we also make recommendations for how to maintain the SEO value, as well as how to improve it. We look at current top keywords, link metrics, and competitor sites, letting the data help direct how the new website is configured in architecture and content.
Discovery Workshop
After we’ve gathered everything we can, this stage of the process culminates in a workshop with key stakeholders to review key learnings and confirm things like through customer personas, motivations, and journeys. By looking at the content, we’ll be able to identify what kind of additional content will be needed (or if some should be maintained and migrated) for various pages. Also during discovery, we’ll chat through design direction possibilities with a couple gut checks to ensure we’re on the right track along with site structure and hierarchy.
The collaboration between our teams works best when we have marketing teams who are ready to put the work in. Uncovering the data through in-depth interviews, poring over branding documents, and running regular meetings takes considerable time and effort. Aligning early on allows a streamlined website redesign process, where your team feels they’ve been heard at each phase and can fully own the brand and messaging at hand-off, no matter how much growth is experienced after launch.
