By Daniel Ghinn 
A global brand owner and one of the world’s largest businesses asked us to help them improve their online support for school science education in the United Kingdom. After carrying out a market research activity and reporting on the competitive landscape online, we suggested running a workshop with three primary target groups – teachers, students, and parents – to explore their approach to learning science on the Internet.
Listening to real users
Having established relationships with participating schools, we planned and facilitated an interactive workshop. By observing real users and listening to their frank and honest comments, we were able to discover new insights about how each of the target groups use the web to support science education.
Informed recommendations shape website design
We documented and interpreted the workshop’s findings, and produced a set of informed recommendations about the immediate and longer term web strategy. This provided an advantage to our client in a competitive market and helped to shape the design of a new website. Our strategic input did not end there – we continued to engage with real target users during the new website design, allowing design decisions to be made based on ongoing feedback from the target groups.
Putting strategy before design
This kind of approach ensures far greater return on investment in a web design project. The alternative approach would be simply briefing a design agency to create a new site based on uninformed design preferences. Experience shows that failure to consider strategic insights prior to the graphic design stage, the satisfaction of releasing a new website can rapidly turn to disappointment.
Read more about putting strategy before design in Benjamin Dwyer’s article.
