My Approach to Solution Design
When approaching a project I’ve often been told by clients that “we’re organised in this way and we have this structure which must be presented to our customers”. However, that doesn’t always translate directly to how your client’s customers want to interact. By having an approach to solution design that allows understanding and collaboration to get the best solution to float to the top, significantly increases chances of success.
I worked with a organisation recently who told me that they had 4 departments and that was how they were to be represented on their new website, with each divisional director sat in front of me, waving their flags for their service. The old site was structured in this way as that’s how they always portrayed themselves as that’s how they knew themselves. When I took the time to understand their organisation, services and most importantly their customers, I gave them a different approach. An approach that asked a simple question of any of their customers looking at the site - just one of 2 directions depending on what service they were looking for. There was no reason for 3 divisions to be presented separately, it just didn’t matter to their customers who were just looking to take one service or another. As a result the site was more successful, with bookings and enquiries significantly up on what had ever gone before.
My approach can be simplified into 4 phases:
- Research the current solution
- Understand your client’s business
- Know your client’s customers
- Define the structure of the solution
Researching the current solution
It’s essential to understand what’s gone before. Understanding the successes and failures of the past allows a new solution to benefit from those positives and negatives.
Firstly, get a site map of the current solution. It’s good to see what you’re dealing with and to get an early understanding and agreement of the scope of the project. This is invaluable if previously unknown sections/pages or functionality crop up as the project progresses.
Get access to the analytics. See what’s popular and what’s not. Use that data to inform the current solution site map so that it’s easily understood by all. There’s a lot of insight there that’s of tremendous value.
Interview your client to understand the current site’s successes, failings and any metrics being currently used. Understand what they’re looking for, and why.
Understand your client’s business
As I mentioned, I don’t like to be told how the solution will be developed by my client. I find a much better solution evolves if you take the time to understand their business, which can of course be a very involving process. I designed a solution from scratch for an existing startup (analogue) business so that their service could move online to allow them to grow nationally. To do that I had to completely understand how they did what they did in order to specify it out in detail. It took a considerable amount of time!
Understanding your client’s business will allow you to help define the goals and metrics for the project that allows you and your client to measure the success of the solution.
The benefits of this consultative approach are many. The process is fun, enlightening, knowledge is unlocked and hidden benefits are discovered along the journey. Having this approach has always got me to the point of being a trusted partner which allows me to give a better service.
Know your client’s customers
As the project is to service the clients of your client, it’s essential to understand them. There’s tremendous benefit to being empathetic to their needs and how to address them. The project must talk to them, not talk at them and that’s a subtlety that’s often missed. That’s why it’s not good to have your client prescribing the approach - it’s easy for the content to be pitched from the wrong perspective.
If you can understand how to trigger your client’s customers emotions in terms of reassurance and provide them with the information for their diligence, then you make the decision easier for the user to make that purchase or fill in that form.
Defining a set of personas is a great tool to break down the site users into simple groups. Each feature or function can be measured against a persona to see how it helps. If there’s no match to a persona, then that feature or content is not needed and should go!
A survey of current customers/users is a truly valuable piece of research. Projects I’ve worked on have interviewed existing customers and on a recent project I’ve run a significant online survey to investigate how the site was being used. The findings were essential in helping shape the successful solution design.
Other means of understanding the site users is to run click analytics (I like Crazy Egg) so that you can see how the site’s used and what content is of interest to the users. This is gold for the UX and design team and it removes/reduces guesswork. You can clearly see what features and content is valuable and what’s overlooked.
Finally, traffic analytics have insight into how the site’s being used. By adding this to the research above affords you a solid understanding of your client’s customers, their needs and motivations which will help shape your new project design.
Define the structure of the solution
Taking the goals of the project, combining them with your understanding of the business and their customers is the part that’s a bit difficult to explain how it’s done. Undertaking the first three steps will surely guide you in the right direction and the solution will crystallise.
There’s some straightforward tasks to complete:
- Get the new site map done - it’s the foundation
- Check features against the personas
- Check features against the goals
- Make sure that the solution design doesn’t exceed the timeline or budget as it evolves
The one tip that I’d like to underline revolves around the project specification. As the solution comes together, features will get defined and those will fall into two groups. The first group is the solution that gets built for the agreed timescale or budget, and the other group rather neatly forms the roadmap for future work. Having a consultative approach and taking the time to understand your client means that the roadmap builds up quickly. The roadmap is a useful way to manage creep. It allows you to manage features into the roadmap and not dismiss them, giving you the means to protect the budget or timeline.
How far you go with this approach allows you to establish either ballpark pricing with an outline specification or complete a full specification ready for a project to start in earnest.
...Don’t let the project end
Once the solution has been live for a little while, it’s time to test against those early metrics to understand the new performance against the old. Be sure to report how the solution is performing against any new performance indicators.
Use the metrics as a basis to test theories. There’s always different layouts of content, features to add or to remove to see what’s the most successful combination. Measure, test, measure & iterate.
Take time to look at the roadmap. All those ideas that came along during the design phase and the build phase are all projects to investigate and build out as priorities and insight change with the knowledge of the new solution. What seemed important at the time may be turned upside down once the new solution is in place as new understanding provides new insight.
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I hope this approach is one that you can adapt for your needs and situation. Each project process has never been the same twice for me and I’m always learning as I approach every project with great new people and challenges. Good luck on your journey!
Iain Ward, Project & Product Director