In order to build a successful website or product, you need to define what you’re doing, why you’re doing it and why it matters. You have to ask those questions before you start designing or building.
Why are we doing this?
Who are we doing it for?
What value will it provide?
How will we measure success?
What can we realistically do?
Whether you’re building something from the ground up, or re-designing an existing website, all websites are strategic by their nature. To build a successful strategy, there are three fundamental questions that must be answered.
What is worth doing?
What are we creating?
What value does it provide?
Every single person involved in the project must agree on and be aware of the answers of these questions. There must be a shared understanding of what is it that being designed and built, and what value does it provide to the customers and to the stakeholders. Why? Because designing a successful user experience will result in value provided to the end users, and in return they will take action: purchase, subscribe, etc. That will lead the stakeholders to invest in the project even more, and the loop of value continues and everyone gets more value and more money, from stakeholders to employees to end users.
What is worth doing?
Once we understand what business owners, stakeholders and users hope to achieve from the project, there will be a huge list of requirements and features to be built. But successful planning means prioritization of what need to be done based of the tradeoff between imprtance and feasibility/viability.
Importance is how crucial something is in providing the value or solving the problem we are intended to solve. Feasibility is how easy it is to build a certain feature. Viability is how easy it is to maintain something once it is built.
If a proposed feature is of low importance and it’s highly unlikely that you can do it:
For existing websites, postopone the feature for a later release.
For new websites, scrap the features out of the project. And if the project as a whole lands here, remove it and move on to the next idea.
If a proposed feature lands in the middle of the graph, they are not critical to be done in the first release of the website despite the perfectionism tendencies that designers and developers have.
If a proposed feature lands in the upper part of the graph with high confidence that it is going to deliver value and high confidence that it can be done, that is where the majority of UX, design and development effort should be spent.
What are we creating?
While the image below is a bit exaggerated, it is very common for teams to have different mental models of what is being built. The reason behind that is very simple. We all experience the world differently based on our previous experiences, biases and technical backgrounds.
CEOs, project managers, designers and developers all see the world differently. The job of a good UX designer is to make sure that everyone is on the same page. Failing to do that, the project will be derailed and it will be a bad experience for everyone involved. Questions and answers have to be collaborated, shared, and documented. Agile does not mean no documentation. Agile means meaningful documentation. The documentation has to reflect features, functionality, content, marketing and everything else.
What value does it provide?
When someone visits a website, they already know what they want from it. For this reason, you must understand who your target audience is, what experiences will be valuable or compelling to those users, and how your offer will be different from competitors and subsitute products.
Final Takeaway
I want you to take your time to answer these important questions: what are you creating, why should anyone care, who are your audience, how is your offer different from everyone else.
Answer these questions for your next client or your next project and you’ll be ahead of the game. See you at the top.