Serious design serious sites. Part 1. Analytics

Understanding the general principles, which, of course, is much more than can fit in this article, you can closely consider the process itself. Design can be divided into a series of consecutive, interconnected stages:

1. Collection of requirements (briefing).

As it was possible to guess, all the design stages are connected with each other, and each subsequent one is built on the previous one. And since the stage of collecting requirements from us is the first, it is logical that it depends on it, in which direction we will move. Usually, all the basic information can be collected in a few days, and in the process of working out the details, the main thing is to ask the right questions.

The first. Find out what goals the project initiator sets, what he wants to get in the end. In addition, you need to accurately determine the criteria for assessing the achievement of this goal, they are not always obvious, even if they seem so. This is important, it is from this understanding that emphasis will be made in the design.

The second. Ask the project initiator to tell everything in his head. Take your time, listen patiently and do not interrupt, your ideas and criticism can always be expressed at the end. If a person is passionate about the idea, he can avidly talk for hours, this is normal. After the story, you need to ask him to summarize and present the idea in one sentence: if this was done, it means that the idea is clearly visible, if not, then the project idea has not yet been fully formed. In general, if the initiator of the project is keen - this is a godsend for the designer, as a rule, such people greatly help in the design process.

Third. Ask about the target audience (CA): who exactly will use the site, and what usefulness it will receive. The answer “all Internet users” is unacceptable, it will mean that the initiator of the project does not understand for whom it is he who creates this project, and therefore it is not clear how to do it. This is how to play darts with eyes closed: where the goal is known, and aiming is not possible. At this stage, ideally, find out the standard parameters of Central Asia: gender, age, region, etc. Be sure to select the core of CA. In addition, you need to understand what devices and software uses Central Asia. The stage of deep work with Central Asia will be in one of the subsequent stages, but for now you need to understand how the project initiator sees it.

Fourth. Find out who are direct and indirect competitors. The answer “no competitors” most likely means that the person has not studied the competitive environment. There are almost always competitors. Even if the idea of ​​the project is unique, Central Asia already uses some sites, which means, at least, there are indirect competitors.

The fifth. Ask about deadlines, budget constraints, meet decision makers, and generally find out all the organizational issues. This is also important to take into account all interests and work calmly.

Many questions intersect with the stages below, the information collected in the first stage will be the basis for further work. It is extremely important to understand the task of the initiator of the project and start moving in the right direction, the cost of the error at this stage is too high.

At the exit we get a text document (brief) with a lot of information from the client. This document must be submitted for approval by the customer, so that he confirms that everything is understood correctly and that nothing has been missed.

2. The objectives of the project and the client.

Each customer, be it external or internal, has its own goals. Some may want to make money on the site, others think of increasing the market share of the offline business using the site, and for others it may be a hobby. In addition, the goals may be in front of the project itself and at the same time differ from the client’s goals, they can be a means of achieving the client’s global goal (the so-called goal tree, when the client has one global goal, and the project has many local goals that are needed to achieve global ).

The vector of design depends on the goals, for example, the client may have a goal - to create a successful profitable business, this means that the designer must pay special attention to designing methods for monetizing the project and, if possible, avoid costly functionality such as video on the site.

In addition to goals, you need to learn from the customer clear success criteria in order to be able to present the result in the way the customer presents it.

At the exit we get a test document with two lists: the goals of the client and the goals of the project. This document must be approved by the customer.

Example:

Project: social network of pet owners.

Objectives of the customer: profit

Project goals:

• Help in choosing a pet
  
  
• Help in solving problems with pets
  
  
• Creating a community theme
  
  
• Creating a database of thematic content
  
  
• Creating a platform for sales and purchases of themed products
  
  

3. CA and characters.

In essence, this is a stage of in-depth study of the target audience. We need to understand who our target audience is, who among the representatives of Central Asia is the core, what are the challenges for each target group.

To begin with, it is worth making a general portrait of the Central Asia, breaking it up into four groups, each of which will have different criteria, which in turn can affect the functionality and interface.

Socio-demographic characteristics: gender, age, education, income level, occupation. Information that we need to lay the right foundation. For example, a site for adolescents aged 15–18 will differ from a site for older people aged 60+.

Psychographic characteristics: lifestyle, personality traits, character traits, life position, value system. More valuable information for design than the first group of criteria. For example, if we know that our CA most appreciates time, we can design a simple interface and give the opportunity to receive not all the content, but the most valuable for a specific target group, or even give personalization tools for each person.

Behavioral characteristics: the reason for registration, the desired benefits, the frequency of attendance of competitors, the degree of readiness to go to another site, attitude to the project (if it is not new), commitment to existing sites, etc. There may be a lot of criteria, you need to start from the project itself. This group of indicators is one of the most important for design. At the same time, it will be very difficult to collect this data. This information may be available to the customer, if we are designing a new version of an existing project, a competitor, who of course will not give it, or it will need to be collected bit by bit through Central Asia polls.

Geographical characteristics: country, city, district. Considering that we are still on the Internet, this is an unimportant criterion for us, but sometimes there are tasks for designing national sites or sites with geolocation, then the importance of this criterion grows dramatically. In addition, if there is a geo-referencing, it can affect the content, which you also need to think about when designing.

After a detailed portrait of Central Asia, we can proceed to the characters. This is a very useful technique for the further generation of ideas. Having an understanding of who our CA is in general, we must break it up into groups of typical users of a future project. Based on the subject of the project, the groups can be combined according to the type of activity, ownership of an object, needs, etc. For example, for a thematic social network, the IT specialists of the group may be the following: system administrator, programmer, director of the IT company, etc. The task of the designer is to create a list of the main target groups of the site, starting from the largest user group (core) and descending. It should be remembered that in addition to regular users there may be own employees, partners, advertisers and many other non-obvious users.

For each group, we come up with a typical character, a certain fictional person, who to the bone is a typical representative of this particular target group. Ideally, find a few living people and talk with them about their lifestyle. Each such character should have: name-surname (use of famous people or acquaintances is prohibited, so as not to distort perception), photo (you can find a beautiful avatar in VK search), age, city of residence, occupation, marital status, a brief description of it activities, habits, tasks, problems, user experience. The description of this person should be in the context of his typical target group, i.e. if he is, for example, a system administrator, and we are designing an IT portal, then the character description should contain information about which IT portals he is currently visiting, what he does for them, what desires he has, etc. We write without fanaticism, 1000 characters per character is enough with a head. The designer needs to get used to the role of each character, put himself in his place. This information will help us better understand our target audience and in the next step generate a lot of useful ideas.

For a complete understanding of Central Asia, sometimes they conduct interviews with users, this is already a field of marketing research.

When analyzing Central Asia, you can mentally transfer the perceived perception and behavior to our project, here again ideas begin to appear, and we also write them in a separate list.

At the exit, we get two documents: a general portrait of Central Asia and a description of the characters for each target group. These documents must be approved by the customer.

Example:

Project: social network of pet owners.

Fig. 1. Character

4. Research competitors.

In order to make a quality project and interest the target audience, we must all know about competitors and understand how to get around them, where their weaknesses are, and where their positions will be difficult to move. In short - to be many orders of magnitude better than all competitors. To do this, we must find and analyze direct and indirect competitors.

There are various methods for searching: a survey of market participants (mini-research), various ratings, articles on the market, just googling. It is very important to look for projects not only in RuNet, but also in the English-speaking part of the Internet, most likely in the western part there are already similar or close projects from which you can borrow interesting ideas.

All competitors need to be divided into direct and indirect. Direct lines are those that work in the same market and offer a similar product (content, functionality), and indirect ones - those that have similar products and can satisfy a part of the needs that the projected project aims at. If we understand that there are already direct competitors, this means that the new project will not be the first in the market, and it will not be easy for it. Here you need to think carefully about the strategy of positioning and identification in a competitive market, i.e. the marketing sphere is affected in the design, and then we must place the correct accents that will “hook” the target audience.

There are different assessment methods, I am impressed by the good old SWOT analysis , it allows you to see the strengths and weaknesses of competitors, and more importantly, the possibilities for your project.

When analyzing competitors, one can use the principle of “reasonable borrowing”, that is, not reinventing the wheel for the most trivial tasks, but simply borrowing them. This is usually done for standard functionality. In addition, there is a remarkable principle of usability: the user is well versed in what he is already used to, and if he knows that, for example, to download files, a string is usually used to enter the URL and the "download" button, then that is what he would expect to all sites.

In the process of studying competitors there may be ideas for the project being designed, they need to be written out in a separate list for the stage of the mind map. In addition, in the first 2 stages, the first ideas could have been born, but usually there are not very many of them, because the design stage is very early, we also write them to this list.

A small lyrical digression. I think among the readers there will be supporters of the blue ocean strategy, which tells us not to compete, but to look for a free niche. A free niche is always a big plus, but competitors still need to be analyzed, because we are building a highly intelligent and complex product that has thousands of facets, so the experience of competitors will clearly not be superfluous: they have many ready-made ideas and things that can be implemented much better .

At the output we get a file with a full analysis of competitors, usually 5 popular thematic projects in runet and 5 western ones are quite enough. For each competitor there should be a SWOT analysis with 4 sections. And, of course, there should be a first list of ideas for the project being designed. The document with the analysis of competitors must be approved by the customer.

Example:

Project: social network of pet owners.

There are almost no competitors in runet, at least serious ones. In the western segment there are several interesting and popular sites with similar topics. The main competitors will be:

http://www.dogster.com/ - international, popular, high quality.

http://www.dogster.ru/ - Russian, average popularity, average quality.

http://www.catster.com/ - international, popular, high quality.

I will not describe the full analysis of competitors on the SWOT principle, everything is clear here, I think.

5. Tasks-problems-solutions (for users).

On the basis of the characters from the stage before last we can proceed to the problems-problems-solutions. Each person always has some tasks, short-term and long-term. There may be several of these tasks, for example, a person may have a global goal - raising his qualifications and local - to find a job. If the goal has not yet been realized, then there are some obstacles (problems), and then we can offer him some solutions that will help him in realizing these goals.

First of all, for each of the characters, we think through a number of tasks that are important specifically for him. All tasks should correspond to the subject of the projected resource, strongly common tasks will not bring us benefit, within the framework of one resource we cannot satisfy absolutely all the needs of all people, we need to remember thematic restrictions and not push everything in a row. Many people make a mistake, thinking that if a person, for example, listens to music onlain on some site, then in any site we design, he will also need such an opportunity. It's a delusion. We cannot create an ideal portal that can accommodate all the capabilities of the Internet, and the more we “blur” the main idea with a bunch of third-party functionality, the worse it will be for further progress.

Having a number of thematic tasks, for each of them we must identify barriers (problems). For example, the task “to find a contractor” may have several problems: “How to distinguish a high-quality contractor from a poor-quality one?”, “How to find the contractor closest to a geographic area?”, “How to send a request to all potential contractors at the same time?” And m .d Doing all this, the ideas themselves will come to mind, for most problems there are obvious solutions, but more on that below.

When we have tasks-problems ready, we can generate solutions, the very ideas that will be the basis of the future project, and, best of all, they are created to solve the problems of our Central Asia, which means they carry great value for the project.

The output should be a file with a pivot table with three columns of the problem-problem-solution, collected from all the characters. In the table, you can make a link to the characters, so that later there would be an opportunity to come back and refine this document. Naturally, this document needs to be approved with the customer, and, in addition, at this stage, the customer can prompt unobvious decisions.

Example:

Project: social network of pet owners.

Fig. 2. Problem-problems-solutions

6. Scenarios of behavior.

This stage is designed to identify errors in logic, set priorities and improve the solutions we have invented. To apply the method, we again need to get used to the character’s image, take its goal and think over its potential behavior scenario (sequence of actions). This needs to be done with each of the goals of all the characters. Scripts need to be written in a special document.

Making scenarios, we can identify the flaws of ideas. For example, when designing a product card in an online store, the designer could forget to make the function of selecting different modifications of the same product: like a store without it can work, but with a significant drawback. The designer makes the script in order to buy the model “X”: go to the main one, select the catalog section, select the right product, choose the “X” modification ... and here he understands that there is no possibility to choose the modification in the project and it needs to be improved.

In addition to flaws, we can find errors in logic. For example, when designing a store, the designer could do a standard ordering process: entering personal data, payment, delivery (the order was not chosen by chance). Next, we make a script: find the goods and click “buy” (I reduced the first part of the script), fill out personal data on the checkout page, make payment via electronic money, indicate the delivery method ... and here is a logical error! Delivery may be paid and affect the cost of the order, which means that the step about delivery must be before payment.

We will return to this stage when the interface prototypes are ready to finally verify the correctness of the ideas.

At the exit, we have a special document with many scenarios of behavior, as well as improved old and new ideas.

Example:

Project: social network of pet owners.

Purpose: choose a dog

Scenario: goes to the main page, finds the Zoo section, goes to the main page of the section with a rubricator for animals and breeds, as well as a special section with general information, goes to the section with general information, where there is a link to an article about choosing an animal, goes to the article and reads it, at the end of the article sees the Read Also block, in which he sees several more articles with more in-depth information, makes a preliminary selection of 3 dog breeds, goes to the main Zoopedias and opens pages with detailed information on selected rocks on each of the pages it links to see sellers of this breed, finally determined the selection and enters the store.

When writing this script, ideas were invented: a rubricator in the Zoo, a block of “Read also”, links to vendors from a page of a certain breed.

PS Under the social network of pet owners, which I showed in the example, we are looking for an investor or buyer. Contact any contacts on the site.

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