Requirements Gathering and Discovery

Need a New Website?
Wait! Have You Gone
Through a Discovery
Process?
Hashtag: #13NTCDisc

Sean Larkin & Brett Meyer
Friday, April 12, 13
The following presentation was prepared for the 2013 Nonproﬁt Technology Conference by Sean Larkin and Brett Meyer of
ThinkShout, Inc.

ThinkShout is an open source technology consulting ﬁrm located in Portland, OR. We provide Internet Strategy and Drupal web
application development services to forward-thinking organizations. For more information, please contact us at: http://
thinkshout.com.

To comment on this session via Twitter and/or to ask questions during the presentation, please use the hashtag: #13NTCDisc.

Session Subtitle:

Everybody wants a pony...
Website Discovery Process (#13NTCDisc)


But there are many types
of ponies.



So let’s avoid making
assumptions.



Session agenda
• Queuing up success (15m)

• Goals, motivations and target audiences (40m - including
group exercises)

• IA, wireframes and design (15m)

• Technical planning & budgeting (5m)

• Tools & takeaways (5m)

• Questions & hopefully answers (5m)


The majority of this 90 minute session will be spent doing hands on exercises with session participants to explore the “Goals,
motivations, and target audiences” for a website redesign.

Disclaimer:
No ponies where hurt in the making of this
presentation.

Jokes are made with good intentions.


Note: It is easy in a session like this for the presenters and session participants to joke around about past web development projects
that might not have been as successful as stakeholders had hoped. In this slide, we want to point out that the presenters and
session participants should feel free to speak freely, but we all need to keep in mind that this sort of work is difﬁcult and everyone
involved in such projects does their best given their experience, availability, budget and other constraints.

Core concepts

• Websites are tools that promote behavioral change

• Content is King

• Understanding what’s at stake, and for whom

• The challenges of working with people and technology

• Waterfall vs. Agile in planning and development



Websites should promote behavior change

• Nobody outside of your office
understands 95% of what
you say at work

• The Curious, the Concerned,
and the Committed

• The “Ladder of Engagement”


Funny note: “Brony” is an Internet meme referring to 20-something year old men who enjoy “My Little Pony.”

Point #1: When approaching a web redesign, nonprofit stakeholders should keep in mind that it’s easy to fall into using internal
jargon when communicating to external audiences. For example, we see this a lot in the environmental movement, where scientific
terms and acronyms such as “watersheds” and “TMDLs” find their way into outreach materials.

Point #2: Our goal in web site redesigns is to turn audiences who stumble into our work or are curious about our work into people to
are concerned about the issues we work on. In turn, we want to inspire people who are concerned about our issues to become
generally committed to our organization’s overall cause/purpose.

Point #3: We often describe this progression as the “Ladder of Engagement.”

Content is king

• There’s no substitute for good writing and compelling
multimedia

• Good content is often less expensive than functionality

• Content can be used across channels

• “Mobile First” = Design for real content


See the following resources on “Content First” mobile strategy:

Understanding & communicating with
stakeholders
• Risks: What’s at stake? And for whom?
• Time constraints and experience gaps
• Everyone in your organization can’t care about every
decision
• Getting buy-in and managing expectations
• Write out roles - most importantly internal roles
• Stakeholders gotta get real (about tolerance & risk)
• The importance of reporting back
• When to choose vendors? How vendors need to work
together


In this slide, we speak to the fact that it’s important for all stakeholders in a web redesign process to understand everyone else’s
expertise and experience in these sorts of processes, as well as to think critically about when and how various stakeholders engage
in this work. Not everyone can be part of every decision regarding a complex redesign. So, stakeholders need to communicate
clearly regarding the decisions that they do care about.

A large part of web development, particularly in discovery, is getting stakeholder buy-in. This is facilitated by continually “reporting
back” on the project’s progress.

At the end of this slide, we will also talk about the art of working with paid vendors, when to bring them in, what roles they should
play, and how different vendors can be best set up for success in partnering on a project.

Waterfall vs. Agile....
and getting things done
• What are the risks?
• The variables: money, time, clarity, buy-in, quality
• When to plan vs. when to prototype and/or iterate
• When to bring on vendors in this process
• Juggling flexibility with accountability
• How much to spend on upfront requirements gathering?
• Getting to the MVP (“minimal viable product” release)


In this slide we explore the two main project management methodologies and discuss the costs of planning and/or iterative
development.

Let’s kick off Discovery


At this point, we will begin the hands-on exercises.

The Equation:

+ + =
Your Your
Money &
organization’s audiences’
Time
goals motivations

The content, design, and
functionality you release



Understanding your
organization’s goals

• Design Questionnaire

• Card sorting exercise (Now, let’s try it!)


A sample design questionnaire is provided as a resource at the end of the presentation.

Society for the Advanced
Awareness of Animals Riding
Other Animals


Our discovery exercises will be based upon a ﬁctional organization: The Society for the Advanced Awareness of Animals Riding
Other Animals.

The photos on this slide are taken from: http://animalsridingotheranimals.tumblr.com.

Understanding your
target audience(s)
• 2 card sorting exercises

• Identifying and prioritizing target audiences

• Examining their motivations

• Persona documentation


A sample persona worksheet is provides as a resource at the end of this presentation.

User Stories

Card-based features
brainstorm



Bringing it all together

The “Cores & Paths
Exercise”


The “Cores and Paths” exercise was developed by the ﬁrm: Boxes and Arrows.

And finally....

The Requirements
Gathering Brief

Next up: Information Architecture


Note: we do not have a generic “requirements gathering brief” document to share with the session participants, because these are
highly-customized and sensitive documents. We will speak to what they should contain however.

Information architecture
1.First pass at Entity Relationship Diagram

2.Site map development - Round #1

3.Clickable wireframes - Round #1

4.Budget Check

5.Detailed Entity Relationship Diagram/Specification

6.Clickable wireframes - Round #2


At this point in the presentation, we will show a number of examples of each of these documents/resources.

It’s important to note that IA documentation is iterative. We often jump between deliverables as they build/complement each other.
The site map and wireframes in particular work together to help us understand how content relates. Wireframes must also be
checked continually against budget/time constraints for the website redesign.

Graphic Design

1.Design brief and style guide

2.Design in the browser

3.Style tile development


At this point we will show a number examples of these design deliverables and how they relate to clickable, responsive wireframes
developed in the Foundation prototyping framework.

Project Plan and Schedule
1.Finalized implementation budget

2.Content matrix

3.Development schedule and project plan

4.QA plan

5.Training plan



Kicking off development
• You can iterate on discovery documentation, but
version control it!

• Iterative development cycles with weekly
deliverables (Don’t cheat on this)

• Report back to internal stakeholders every week



Tools of the trade
• Note cards, note cards, and more note cards
• A camera....
• Google Docs (no MS Word Docs)
• Trello, Stormboard or Stixy
• Pinterest
• Omnigraffle
• Foundation wireframes
• GitHub Pages
• ThinkShout’s collection of sample Discovery docs


Evaluate This Session!
Each entry is a chance to win an NTEN engraved iPad!

or Online using #13NTCDisc at www.nten.org/ntc/eval


Requirements Gathering and Discovery

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