Consulting and discovery
Creating a successful website can be a daunting task. With so many moving parts and variables to consider, it’s easy to get lost in the complexity of it all. That’s where we come in.
We’ll help you to identify:
Your user needs
We can identify this by conducting research and analysis to gain insight into your users’ pain points, preferences, behaviours, and motivations. This is the path to achieving user-centric designs that are enjoyable, useful, and accessible.
Your business goals
How do your values and vision equate to measurable business outcomes? We can nail down tangible targets and an effective plan for achieving them. From enhancing brand awareness to increasing customer engagement and conversion.
Your technology choices
We can assess the potential impact of emerging technologies on your project. Making informed technology choices and exploring innovative solutions can ensure that you’re not leaving huge potential gains on the table.
Leave nothing to chance
Our consulting and discovery process is designed to remove risk, eliminate waste, and set your website project up for success. You are unique, so your website should be too. How else would it solve your specific problems, and meet your specific goals? Discovery is how we arrive at a distinct and effective tailored solution.
Prepare for success
“If I had an hour to solve a problem I’d spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and five minutes thinking about solutions” – Albert Einstein
A good plan requires a comprehensive understanding of the situation. We take the time to analyse the nuances of your unique challenges. So, if you’re looking for a design consultancy that can get to the heart of the matter, we’re here to help. This is how we work together to create a meaningful, actionable plan that delivers on your business objectives.
Get in touch
Contact us today to learn more about how we can help you take your online presence to the next level.
This will be dependent upon the complexity of your project. A good discovery process can provoke profound re-evaluation in light of the insights that it reveals, so it’s best not to rush. Much easier to make sweeping changes in the planning phase, than in the technical development phase.
Keep in mind that time and money spent during discovery saves time and money later. It protects you from a website build that would otherwise meander, stall, be prone to scope-creep and setbacks, and ultimately fall wide of the mark. If you can tolerate a little uncertainty about the duration of discovery, you’ll reap the rewards by laying accurate groundwork for a focussed and predictable build phase.
Some examples include:
- Budget. If you have a hard-and-fast figure allowable, this would be important to know from the outset, as it informs all other considerations, dictating what is feasible.
- Brand identity. Any brand guidelines and assets will help set the tone for all that follows.
- Target audience. Who is your online presence aimed at? Any data you have about their demographics or motivations will be invaluable.
- Current website. Share any thoughts or metrics about its shortcomings as you/your users see them.
- Competitors. Who are your industry peers, and how do you differ from them? Have you seen any websites that you’d like to emulate?
- Content. Do you have content that you need to migrate? Do you have a content strategy, and who would be responsible for fleshing out your new website before launch?
- Technical requirements. Let us know about any must-have functionality or software integrations for your new site.
You will be integral to it. How much time you’re willing or able to dedicate is of course up to you, but for us to do your project justice, you should expect the process to feel like a close partnership. We’ll be asking you to provide us with as much information as possible, to attend multiple scheduled meetings, to review and approve plans, sitemaps, and design briefs, and to provide feedback.
Not at all. It is up to you to decide which agency to work with for each phase of your website project. If, after our discovery phase, you’d prefer different agencies to tackle the design and build phases, you are free to take your new website plan to them. The deliverables that we provide should make it easy for any agency to provide you an accurate quote, and to create exactly what you need, provided they have the expertise.
That said, we hope that Shape Works would be the clear favourite to see your project through once we have formed a productive relationship with you, gained a deep knowledge of your requirements, and proved our value.