What is a website discovery?
Website discovery is an often-mandated and crucial phase of developing a new website, system or service, particularly when considering projects with scale, complex integrations or audiences, or involves public funding.
Investing time and effort in diagnosing user challenges, providing actionable insights, and understanding the technological, creative and marketing options available, a digital discovery enables you to define a more considered scope of requirements.
Ultimately this helps to streamline process, reduce project wastage and improve project outcomes.
The Spindogs approach to discovery
With years of experience in scoping websites, solving complex UX challenges and undertaking detailed analytics research, we’ve developed a unique discovery proposition that takes advantage of Spindogs’ range of specialist knowledge. With scope to tailor areas of coverage or detail, Spindogs Discovery is based on three key principles and three clear stages of activity:
- Insights - Unbiased situation analysis & insights
- Exploration - Inclusive exploration and comprehension
- Definition - Defined, clear and actionable outcomes
The power of three flows through Spindogs’ DNA, and is not limited to Discovery. Our philosophy is founded on three-dimensional thinking: the inclusion of a key third voice, your audience, to our client relationships, and the application of three viewpoints, technical advantage, marketing performance and brand strength to all projects. This approach ensures that our Discovery recommendations are more considered and the outcomes are ultimately more successful.
Best practice recommendations informed by data
The Insights phase of discovery is designed to arm us with an unbiased snapshot of your current digital status.
Taking in and learning from your immediate competition ensures we can objectively compare, and provides a relatable jumping off point for discussions around content, brand and functionality. This is supported by a series of creative and technical audits – including our unique competitor benchmarking and page scoring tools – and is designed to assess both current performance and identify gaps and areas for improvement.
Interactive stakeholder engagement
Our Exploration discovery phase has the sole aim of providing actionable outcomes from which to launch your new project.
Incorporating stakeholder workshops, interviews and surveys, we use our Insights report to provoke discussion, enabling our team of specialists to draw informed conclusions and make recommendations across all project touchpoints. From interactive user journey and site mapping exercises to open-ended discussion and investigation about functionality, Exploration is a great opportunity to engage key internal and external stakeholders with your project.
Clear and actionable website scoping
Drawing on our initial Insights stage and informed by discovery Explorations, the Definitions phase leaves you with a clear set of briefs and briefing assets, detailed delivery requirements and considered plans for implementation.
Collating our recommendations into a single Discovery Report, we playback our findings and observations in a collaborative session that walks you through our rationale, providing reference where required. The Discovery Report document can easily be adapted into an external brief or an internal schedule of works once finalised.