5 Questions to Help Discover Your Website’s Primary Objective
Strategic communication is the best communication, so it’s important to define the strategy in the discovery stage of the project. Our strategy will determine the tactics we use for a developing a successful website. It’s hard to determine the strategy without knowing first what the primary objective of the project is. I have broken the discovery phase of user centered into 7 categories; each category may have questions, test or exercises.
- Audience Discovery
- Accessibility Discovery
- Brand Discovery
- Goal Discovery
- SEO Discovery
- Speed Discovery
- Usability Discovery
Over the years I’ve acquired quite an arsenal of questions for gathering information. Below are 5 questions that I use in the Goal Discovery category.
- What exactly is purpose of this website? (please define a clear, concise objective)
- What is your vision for the website?
How will you determine whether the vision is a success? - What are your goals for this website and each section of the website?
Are the goals really the goals? Can you define alternative goals? Last year Home Depot sold millions of ¼” drill bits. “Nary a soul” (as my grandmother used to say) wanted ¼”drill bit, they all wanted 1/4” holes. What is the end result, users need? - Can you rank the applicable purposes of your site below, with 1 being the most important?
[ ] Information
[ ] Branding
[ ] Lead generation/qualifying prospects
[ ] Sales revenue
[ ] Ad revenue
[ ] Internal needs
[ ] Transformation
- What are the 3 main things you want people to do you your web site?
Some of the questions will lead to more questions, and hopefully, they will help define the overall strategy.