Strategy & Insights
As a digital strategy and website design agency, we employ a range of techniques that we’ve refined over the years. We know how to diagnose a challenge to determine a way forward. The key is to simplify complexity in order to align minds and focus resources into the right areas.
Research to define a problem is useless without a set of coherent actions. Strategy is about action and we’re experienced at designing simple, clear and effective plans that deliver measurable results.
Services may include: Digital Strategy, Content Strategy, User Journeys, Information Architecture
Content Strategy
From social media, to emails, to websites, compelling content is critical to your online success. Without a coherent and achievable content strategy, you’re doomed from the start.
We identify key take-outs that users are expecting from the proposed website. This provides the early stage building blocks of the type of content and functionality we expect to see in the website.
It’s at this point that we can also consider which social media platforms are most appropriate to support the website’s objectives.
Audience Research
It’s all too easy to assume that you already know what your audiences expect from your website. After all - you know your products and you know your sector right?
Whilst we’re strong proponents of heuristic design, we’re also only too aware that a website can truly miss the mark if it doesn’t consider its key audience’s needs:
- Investors will want to see how their investment is performing
- Employees and prospects may well want to see that a company or organisation has a great culture, supports staff and is growing
- Customers are primarily interested in your products or services, but may have all manner of queries or comments so will want direct contact with you
- The press will want to know who to speak to when you make that big announcement
Through techniques such as user research, stakeholder interviews and persona development our role is to ensure that your project is planned, written and built around your audience’s specific needs & expectations, whilst maintaining your key business and operational requirements in focus throughout.
Competitor Analysis
We use competitor analysis to ensure we fully understand who’s doing a great job and who’s really dropping the ball; both instances are useful and insightful for us. We can use this to inform, avoid and differentiate as necessary, all the while ensuring that what we plan and design for you is carefully considered, on target and unique.
Benefits
- Saves time
- Avoids painful mistakes that competitors have already made
- Ensures brand and content differentiation
Design Sprints
Design sprints enable us to understand problems, evaluate the best solutions and then learn from these in a short amount of time. The key here is to create something tangible such as a prototype in a timely manner to test. This allows us to concentrate on solving the problem before going into what can be a longer production cycle.
These aren’t suitable for all projects, and there must be enough information to inform the sprint before it starts, but sprints can be an invaluable way of learning in a lean way, and many of the elements are used in longer project processes.
Persona Development
Once we understand who your audience is, we can start to build individual ‘User Profiles’ that help the whole team - e.g. clients, content writers, designers, testers etc. to understand and recognise typical users of the project. Their level of detail will vary, however aspects like age, gender, interests, salary, job role etc can all help us to really understand and step around in the shoes of different users, understanding their motivations, concerns, expectations etc.
Benefits
- Ensures a project remains user focussed
- Avoids making assumptions that a client, content writer or designer might make
- Fast, insightful and flexible
Website Audits
It’s only when we have a set of clear, understandable metrics that we can start to affect real, measurable change and ROI.
Whilst we’re naturally interested in a website’s analytics we’re not huge fans of simply running automated bots over a website and calling it an audit. Instead, we prefer to assess a client’s website from the big picture, macro perspective right down into the micro detail. We’ll go the extra distance to really understand how and why a website ticks, where it’s underperforming and what actions and metrics can be put in place to really know when and how it’s improved.
Benefits
- Insightful and measurable understanding of how your website is performing
- Meaningful metrics that can help to justify additional activity
- More than just an automated bot searches and reporting