PROJECT PLANNING AT ACRO

Discovery: Exercises & Outcomes

Discovery is the foundation of our project planning process at Acro. Anders Paulsen, Director of User Experience, guides us through the exercises our teams go through to help uncover all of the information we need to help your project meet its goals.

Transcript

Hi, I’m Anders Paulsen, Director of User Experience at Acro Commerce.

In this next portion of our Project Planning series, we’ll take a closer look at Discovery & Strategy, with a focus on the Discovery exercises we use to explore project requirements.

For site redesign or migration projects, we’ll begin with an audit of your existing website’s structure to gain a better understanding of what you’re currently working with.

To conduct a thorough Technical Audit, our Software Architect will require access to your site’s back-end to review its overall structure.

They’ll be focused on identifying required

• integrations,
• modules,
• content types,
• noting product and catalog structure —
• and especially any custom features and functionality.

Meanwhile, on the front of your website, our designers conduct a Content Inventory, exploring the site’s

• Menu Structure,
• Content Pages,
• Content Types,
• Workflows, and
• notable Features & Functionality.

The current structure is documented in the form of a Sitemap Diagram, which provides the team with a visual reference for discussion purposes.

As an exercise, creating a content inventory provides the opportunity to get more familiar with your site, allowing our team to make observations, and begin to note areas for improvement. It also helps to ensure that we haven’t missed anything that should be accounted for in the upcoming project.

Whenever possible, we’d also like to gain access to your site’s Analytics, to help gauge performance and identify any overall trends.

We’ll look at things like 

• site traffic,
• visitor demographics,
• bounce rates,
• and identify popular content and products, if applicable.

Any further insight you’re able to provide in this area can be a real bonus — whether it’s an Analytics Report or just a quick list of notable stats.

We’ll also want to get familiar with your Branding Guidelines, to gain a sense of what our Designers will be working with.

Any Visual References you can provide are also helpful —

• sharing things like your own collateral as PDF files
• a list of market competitors you’d like us to review
• or a list of websites from any industry that you’d like us to reference for functionality or design.
• Just be sure to provide notes along with any of these reference lists to ensure we’re on the same page regarding your preferences …

But we’ll also want to hear as much as we can about your project from you directly during our Discovery Sessions.

These meetings often start with covering project objectives and identifying your business goals & motivations for starting the new project. But we’ll likely steer the discussion towards a focus on the Users of your site,

• striving to identify the needs of both your website Customers — those visiting the Front-end of your website
• and the Administrative users — those managing the Back-end of your site

By centring on the needs of your site users, we can begin to identify the requirements that will make up an optimal experience.

Typically, we’ll start by focusing on your Customers, identifying your target demographics and customer profiles and asking questions such as…

• Who is primarily visiting your site?
• What are their goals? (the things they hope to accomplish)
• What are their frustrations? (the challenges they currently face and things they’d rather avoid)

With a similar approach, we’ll want to find out more about your team’s Admin roles —

• What are the primary goals and objectives of each role?
• What challenges do your team members currently face?

As we identify your users' goals and frustrations, we’ll also want to account for why each is important.

This allows our team to gain a relative sense of priority for finding solutions, helping to inform the order in which we plan to develop and implement possible features and functionality.

Throughout these discussions, questions and answers often lead to more in-depth conversations around workflows, integrations, technical requirements, and sometimes the limitations of past solutions.

In the next chapter, we’ll look more closely at the outcome of this initial Discovery phase and the deliverables that make up our project Strategy for moving forward…

Thanks for listening.

Up Next, Strategy.