Setting the goals
Before starting to design or develop a website for yourself or a potential customer, it is essential to do research based on your goal you want to archive with the websites. This research could for example be a simple user research method or a market analysis, to see where are the gaps that you can fill up with your project. After pointing out problem points, you will be able to define goals which are going to support your work for the future. It is important to set realistic goals, that can be achievable in a certain period of time.
Below, you can see a simple list of goals that you can set for a website:
- In the next 2 months, 5000 new visitors should visit the website
- The website should generate 3-4 new newsletter subscribers per week
- The website should be widely known in the region of Austria
- The user should be able to buy a product in less than 5 minutes
- Personal goals
- ...
I recommend that you go over your goals again after some period of time, add some new ones, change existing ones, so you can accomplish a continuous goal oriented style of designing and developing.
How to accomplish your goals?
It is not only important to set goals for your project, but also to point out ways of how to you plan to accomplish them. An easy way to do this is to write down possible ways of accomplishing the goals, in parallel to writing the goals. A goal may have many ways to accomplish it, write down everything that comes into your mind.
Defining the target group
Here we come to the most important part of every project, regardless of the core. Defining the target group! You need to know for who you are designing and developing, who are the users who will regular visit your website? What do they want to do on the website? How can they accomplish their goals?
The description of the target group will help you in the design and developments process, but not only for them, but also for content management and marketing. I always tend to define two target groups: primary and secondary.
After defining your target group, it is important to see what would they do on your website. Some techniques to research those tasks are mind maps, personas, user flows, etc.
User research represents a core component of every project, thus it deserves a separate part of this series, which I am going to present you next.
