{"id":1616,"date":"2014-12-16T14:13:38","date_gmt":"2014-12-16T14:13:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/webdev\/?p=1616"},"modified":"2016-06-07T16:36:13","modified_gmt":"2016-06-07T15:36:13","slug":"kicking-off-discovery-website-redesign","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/webdev\/2014\/12\/16\/kicking-off-discovery-website-redesign\/","title":{"rendered":"Kicking off discovery – website redesign"},"content":{"rendered":"

How can we better meet the needs of the University and its users?<\/p>\n

The first stage for our website redesign<\/a> is to understand business and user needs, this exploration comprises the discovery phase<\/a> of the project.<\/p>\n

The discovery phase helps us to understand what we are trying to achieve by a redesign.<\/p>\n

Needfinding is fundamental process that builds the foundations for our future website – the University site must serve a clear purpose.<\/p>\n

\"P1376-new-theme-discovery\"<\/a><\/p>\n

To kick off discovery, we’ve broken the phase into business needs, analytics, user needs and design inspiration:<\/p>\n

Business needs<\/h2>\n

\"business-needs-postits\"<\/a><\/p>\n

For business needs we’re looking at key high-level\u00a0strategic documents\u00a0for the University, interviewing stakeholders and performing a competitor analysis.<\/p>\n

We’ve already began summarising key documents and focusing on high level aspects that the University site exists to help support. The key\u00a0documents are the Institutional Plan<\/a>, Brand Guidelines<\/a> and a research document by consultants Uffindel West (which led to our current brand).<\/p>\n

Stakeholder interviews will be organised with a sample of stakeholders to understand the different priorities that are needed from the website.<\/p>\n

We’ll also be undertaking a competitor analysis to understand what other universities are doing and to be inspired.<\/p>\n

User needs<\/h2>\n

We’ll be working with other teams to gather user testing feedback. Surveys will help us understand how people user our site and discover what their pain points and potential solutions are.<\/p>\n

Analytics<\/h2>\n

Analytics help us to understand where are users are coming from. How they move through our site? Where do they leave our site? Popular pages, heat-maps and search terms all help to give us clearer information about what people are doing on our site.<\/p>\n

Inspiration boards<\/h2>\n

Supporting this will also be the competitor analysis. What do we like about other sites? What are other Universities doing here and abroad? What is our competitive edge?<\/p>\n

All these questions help inspire us, giving direction to our design principles and guiding\u00a0our\u00a0visual language<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Personas<\/h2>\n

\"personas\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Personas<\/a> are models of user groups represented as a single archetype character. These are based on data and research and help developers, designers and editors focus on creating content that meets\u00a0their intended audience’s needs.<\/p>\n

Personas help summarise the needs and scenarios and help you to keep the user at the forefront as you design or\u00a0create content.<\/p>\n

We’ll also create story boards to illustrate the context of our users. It is important that we understand the full service – user experience is wider than only the website and needs to resonate as a unified service across all customer touchpoints – print, email, phone, online…<\/p>\n

We developed five personas last year and will be refining and renewing these versions, as well as additions for other user groups, based on our discovery phase research.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

How can we better meet the needs of the University and its users? The first stage for our website redesign is to understand business and … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":17235,"featured_media":1697,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[690,79443,79395,79421,79439],"tags":[79463,23153],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/webdev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1616"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/webdev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/webdev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/webdev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/17235"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/webdev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1616"}],"version-history":[{"count":30,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/webdev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1616\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1654,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/webdev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1616\/revisions\/1654"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/webdev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1697"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/webdev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1616"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/webdev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1616"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/webdev\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1616"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}