A Sound, Comprehensive, Systematic Methodology

The first sound, comprehensive methodology for producing or revising websites and online products/applications. These projects are highly complex, so they require a sophisticated approach. The methodology consists of research into online-business strategy and opportunities to satisfy user-aims online, creating and evaluating concepts for websites and online products to achieve these objectives, quickly designing UI, visuals, content, marketing, and web analytics, getting the design developed efficiently and accurately, monitoring progress, and expertly managing the entire process. The five stages and the steps within them are both necessary and sufficient to ensure adequate planning and a quick, successful project with minimal costs and risks.

Focus is on your ROI and Business Results

From the first step in our process to the final result, we stay focused on the true reason you’re doing the project: to enhance or improve your business in some meaningful way. This focus is absolutely necessary if the project is not to stray off into something with a life of its own. We use sophisticated decision-analysis tools in each step they are needed, to get you the best return on your investment. The alternatives are a marketing focus or an IT focus.

Effective Planning with Clear, Fully-Supported Objectives

We address all necessary steps and issues that must precede design work. The project team is clear about what it’s trying to accomplish, hence able to work more efficiently and autonomously. Our plans and prototypes are realistic guides to a successful result, with real ROI calculations and evaluations. This ensures a low-risk, predictable, tightly manageable design and development process. This way of doing projects is normal outside the software industry, but rare inside it. The alternatives are either to pass the buck to the client for these steps, or to try to skip planning altogether. Both alternatives usually lead to expensive rework and results that do not fulfill their business objectives.

Online-Product Innovation

As the name of our company indicates, we specialize in the development and enhancement of Internet products. We use a very different approach to new-product innovation and improvement than the three most common ones. The first is to rely on a genius or sheer luck to come up with an innovative concept for a product. The second is to try to create product concepts from the fruits of market research, although these often steer a company toward the wrong customer-aims to try to satisfy, and do little to produce real innovation. The third is to start with a new technology and then try to find a way to make money from it: a solution in search of a problem. The need for extreme speed in the rush to beat competitors to market is often cited as an excuse for doing a quick and dirty job of product innovation, even though it usually results in poor-quality products that fail. It is interesting to note that neither Apple nor Google—famously successful in this area—work this way.

 

Our approach is to collaborate with the right company personnel—making use of their expertise, available data, and interviews—to define the opportunity accurately: which aims of what categories of customers should the product attempt to satisfy? Which aims is the company able and willing to address? What kinds of customers have such aims? Which of the aims are presently well satisfied by alternatives? Once the aims are nailed down, we create a range of innovative product-concepts to meet them, taking full advantage of the latest emerging technologies and our information and communication expertise. We help the company evaluate all the pros and cons of each concept from a business standpoint and decide which, if any, is most likely to succeed.

Virtualized Business Functions

We model websites as virtual forms of a company’s real departments. We also use a sophisticated understanding of what the true aims of departments need to be, drawn from the organizational sciences. This leads to a clearer understanding and better decisions about how to “virtualize” your business. It shows what the website can and should do for your company, and how its functionality can replace or complement the functions of departments in the real company (especially sales, customer service, and inter-departmental collaboration). Therefore, our designs perform as closely as technology allows to the ideal way a real person would perform these functions.

Insights from Organizational Science that Help Design Websites & Online Products

Planning and achieving goals, solving problems, and making sound decisions: selecting the right aims, defining them clearly, and ensuring you can achieve them.

 

Understanding the true functions of departments, so they succeed individually and collectively. Marketing as effective communication to create opportunities for sales. Sales as an effective problem-solving service for your customers. Support as a means of improving customer satisfaction after the sale and as feedback the company can use to improve performance.

 

Stakeholders inside and outside your company: get clear who they are and what their legitimate aims are, resolve conflicts among these aims, decide on which aims the project will address and its objectives to meet them.

 

Please see Our Skills & Tools for what we bring to these approaches.