Gradual Evolution vs. Big Bang
Many clients view the Web the same way they view other capital investments or major enterprise software projects. They often follow a classic waterfall approach where they:
- Identify all key stakeholder groups
- Ascertain their needs
- And finally, figure out what these visitors goals
Teams at the big, expensive agencies will spend countless hours brainstorming and developing detailed personas and intricate user scenarios with the goal of predicting what will work and what will be rejected.
We like the Bill Bernbach (buy the book) approach, THINK SMALL.
For general marketing and content-driven sites, we advocate a much more streamlined approach that relies on small teams, AGILE or RAD development, a strong focus on creative design and rapid, iterative release cycles guided and optimized by analyzing actual traffic and usage data.
This approach has several advantages, including:
- Reduced overhead
- Simplified project management
- The ability to get initial site versions launched very quickly
Then, we rely on actual usage and traffic data as well as explicit user feedback to further guide iterative improvements and added functionality in subsequent releases. It’s best to let the site users tell us what they want implicitly through analysis of site metrics and explicitly through feedback from focus groups or pilot users. This way, we end up with a site that is more aligned with actual user needs rather than what your agency thought they might want.
