Key Issues

All projects need to consider key business issues, but online ventures require more in-depth understandings of a company’s corporate mission and its preparedness for meeting its goals. During this phase, core business needs are addressed, from market analysis and brand development to staffing, partnerships, and capitalization. During this phase, the company’s success is most important, as opposed to the success of a specific project.

This development involves participation at the highest levels of a company’s management and has long-range and long-lasting implications. These activities often include the overall development or evolution of corporate or site brands and the needs of sites to address organizational change. They include the following activities, resulting in the following deliverables:

The first real development step toward a solution takes place during the Concept and Planning (imagine) phase. This is where the Goals, Messages, and Audience for the project are explored and decided. These are the most important questions that will be addressed throughout the project and have the most impact. These answers cannot be described too well. Often, they are not described at all and it is surprising how few clients are ready with these answers when they are asked. Market research can sometimes provide parts of the answers but the client must at least, decide the overall goals and messages consciously.

Many times a Proof of Concept is a valuable part of the development, to both help visualize the purpose of the project as well as use it as an internal selling tool to gain support and understanding for the project. Usually, proofs of concepts are not used outside a client’s organization.

Lastly, the Requirements Document should address all of the design requirements for the project, including any metrics for how the success of the project will be measured when completed. At the very least, the audience(s) needs to be carefully described, as well as the messages intended for them, and, of course, the goals. This sounds simplistic and obvious, but it is hardly ever done adequately. Every decision from this point forward will be derived and affected by these answers. Part of the Requirements Document should address the proposed technology for the project, the market, and the competition. The most difficult part of this phase is convincing clients that these questions are tantamount to answer as they will be eager to move forward and see “work” (meaning screen designs) and often grow impatient with these “distractions.”

Some of the activities conducted during this phase with their resulting deliverables include:

A list of questions to answer during this phase include:

Goals and Messages
• Primary and Secondary Goals of the Product
• Primary and Secondary Goals of the Client/Publisher
• Primary and Secondary Audience Description (interests, needs, skills, capabilities, assumptions)
• Platform Descriptions (make, models, RAM, hard drives, CD-ROM, data load for each)
• Top three messages the product needs to convey
• Rethink the goals. Are they the true goals or merely the obvious ones?

Content
• Does this product use primarily existing content? If yes, how is it to be re-purposed? In what ways will it be made appropriate to the interactive medium?
• If new, how will it be captured and created? How much will there need to be?
• Does this product use data entered by users? If so, how much and in what forms? What can be done with it once entered?

Structure and Interpretations
• What is the primary organization of the content?
• What are other organizations that can be made available for other modes of
• searching, viewing, browsing, learning, exploring, and understanding?
• What are the main presentation ideas of the structure of the title/project?
• What are the most important and compelling features?
• Are there any novel interactions? If so, what are they?
• What is the level of interactivity?
• Are there any adaptive technologies employed? Which ones and how?
• Are there any co-creative features?

Sensorial Design
• Describe the overall visual elements and styles of this product (use adjectives if necessary).
• Describe the overall auditory elements and styles of this title
• Describe the overall text elements and written portions of this title
• Describe any ideas about animation style and use
• Describe any ideas about video style and use
• Describe the sophistication of programming needed
• Describe any current authoring systems that are intended for use or modification

Team
• Who are the primary members of the production team? What are their roles and responsibilities? What is their experience?
• Are there technical, programming, marketing, and media professionals represented on the team?

In this phase, the first examples of solutions are derived. It is the most intense, complex phase and involves the most creativity, coordination, and inspiration. The requirements document from the previous phase should provide all of the answers as to what the project should accomplish, but it is in this phase that the development team derives how it will accomplish these things.

This phase includes the development of many prototypes, often the first merely in paper and sketches, while later ones might be more elaborate. There are often two semi-parallel tracks of development. In the first, the experience (or front-end) team is designing the interface for the experience while an engineering team may be prototyping actual engineering solutions. Ideally, both teams work together, but depending on the size of the project, it’s complexity, and the amount of cutting-edge technology involved, the interface team may need to develop and prototype the experiences, formulate a preliminary specification and hand-off to the engineering team while they explore how to make it work. Prototypes, for the most part, are examples and not the final solution. They are usually hard-coded, that is, they don‚t actually work as intended, only appear to. They are simulations when it comes to the interface, but the engineering team may need time to develop and plan the feasibility of these solutions before production can start.

These prototypes should be tested with potential users to determine if they really meet the needs of the audience. User testing is too often forgotten or underutilized. It is essential that assumptions are tested and problems are corrected. Even the best development team cannot plan for everything that the audience may encounter or outguess every user’s understandings. Also, past this point, user testing will be useless, meaning that it will not be possible to address anything that user testing identifies once a project is in production.

After the front-end interface is mostly finalized, it is time for the engineering team to integrate it into whatever technical prototypes they have been building. These technical prototypes are the results of research and development that concentrates on the back-end, technical requirements to make the front-end work properly. It is essential that the front-end development proceed before the back-end decisions are finalized. Technical work can occur in tandem, but it is not a good idea to allow the technology drive the development of the users‚ experience.

At the end of this phase, the final prototype needs to be accompanied by a Functional Specification that, together, describes every aspect of the final product. This is what the production team will use to produce the entire project. Also needed before production can start is a Visual Design Specification (a detailed description of the intent of the visual design) as a part of the overall Functional. Spec. and a Production Matrix. This later part describes every element that needs to be produced and where it fits into the whole project. This is what will be used to determine the budget, scheduling, and team during Production.

Experience (Front-end) Development

Engineering (Back-end) Development

Some of the questions to answer during this phase include:

Information Design
• What are the final organizations and structure of the information within the product?
• What different ways are there to find and use this information?

Interaction Design
• What level of interactivity is the target?
• Describe all adaptive technologies? How will these be developed? How will they be
• simulated for the prototype?
• Describe all co-creative technologies? How will these be developed? How will they
• be simulated for the prototype?
• Describe the cognitive model created in the user’s mind?
• How can this be verified in user testing?

Storyboards
• What are the most important or complex processes to storyboard and simulate?
• What level of detail is needed to communicate these?

Prototyping Tools
• Which programs or authoring tools can be used to simulate the product’s behavior
• in the prototype? What are the strengths and weaknesses of each?
• Can these be modified and in what ways?
• Which product is the easiest to simulate the most important features in the prototype?

Media Development
• How much media will need to be developed to create the prototype and simulate
• the most important features and processes?

User Testing
• With how many users should the product be tested?
• Who should these be? What is their experience? What are their assumptions and understandings?
• Will the user-testing be videotaped (or otherwise recorded)?
• What is the user test plan?
• How long will the user testing phase take?
• How will the results be recorded, compiled, and addressed?

Iteration
• What are the most critical problems?
• What are the assumptions that still hold true?
• How can the problems be addressed while keeping the benefits?
• How much time will it take to make changes?
• When can the second round of user testing be completed?

While this is a busy period, up to this point, all questions should have been answered in the previous two phases and should now be described in the Functional Specification as well as the Final Prototype. Team members, based on the notes from the previous two phases, can now answer any detailed, residual questions. The idea is that the careful planning already completed will prevent any big revelations from occurring that might change the scope or nature of the project. If this happens, however, it may send the project back to the Concept and Planning phase (that is, if the goals, audience, or messages sufficiently change), or at least, back into the prototyping stage. This is why it is so important to get those answers right at the beginning.

As the project comes together, it can be “built” into temporarily working instances called “builds.” These builds will go through many iterations before complete, often labeled Alpha 1, 2, 3, etc. When production is finished, the project still isn't yet. It still needs to be tested and made live. At this point, everything should be finished and integrated into the Beta Build.

Defect Reporting
This is the phase most likely to be forgotten, understaffed, under-scheduled, or under-budgeted. However, it is essential that every piece of the project be tested adequately before it is launched. Testing here does not refer to user testing but to component testing or Quality Assurance (QA or DR). Every responsive element and link must be checked on every screen in every browser on every platform, etc. It is detailed, laborious work, but it is essential for creating a professional product. Each series of testing, fixing, and rebuilding is labeled with a new release: Beta 1, 2, 3, etc.

There are many types of testing, including Unit Testing (the testing of every component), Integration Testing (checking that the whole works even as all of the parts work), Stress Testing (Testing the whole system under heavy load conditions), Configuration Testing (checking the compatibility of different configurations of the system, Environmental Testing (checking the installation to be sure that it works in a specific environment in regards to noise, heat, and other conditions), and various forms of Content Testing (to be sure that the latest versions of content were used and that everything meets stylistic and grammatical standards), and Regression Testing.

The Production Matrix from the previous phase is now reused as a Testing Matrix, for helping track all of the tested elements and components. The Test Plan needs to encompass all testing objectives and coordinate multiple testers working independently.

Activity: Deliverable
Functional Testing: Beta Builds
Unit Testing
Integration Testing
Stress Testing
Configuration Testing
Environmental Testing (if required)
Content Testing: Beta Builds
Fact-checking
Spelling and Grammar checking
Media Testing
Iteration and Bug fixes: Beta Builds
Testing Completion: Test Report

At the end of the testing phase, when all problems have been fixed, the project can launch. However, this is not the end of the project. In many ways, it is only the beginning as the application or product will need to now be maintained with new content, features, functionalities and interactions for as long as it is live. While minor additions can be added seamlessly, major ones will need to be added carefully and may require a new approach to be developed during a new design cycle (back to Concept + Planning).

Many clients underestimate the budget, time, people, and energy needs of keeping their products updated constantly. Some products don’t need a lot of updating, but those that have constant and continuous updating of data (such as an online news site or store) will need not only a sophisticated content management system, but also the support people necessary to keep it running.

Lastly, this is now the opportunity for the development team to reflect back on the development process and review what worked well, what didn’t, and why.

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