It seems that we’ve been so busy working on everyone else’s websites that we haven’t had time to stop and kick-off the new design & development of our own. At last, the Grudenites have got together to talk about everything Gruden online.

We’ve decided to document the entire process as we go along, so you can see what really goes into a complete site refresh. This covers scoping to go-live and everything in between, and will all be live via the Gruden blog.

Here you’ll be able to check out our workshops, brainstorms, wireframes, look & feels and late-night sabbaticals, including a running tally of Dan & Jacko’s coffee intake and the use of the term “engagement”.

We kicked things off late last week with a 2-hour workshop to help develop a shared understanding of our users and their goals, and how they matched up with our own internal business goals. This touched on how our site could meet user and business needs simultaneously, and what was needed in order to roadtest the process.

 Grudenites asked themselves a few key questions, including:

• Why would a user come to our site?
• What is a user looking for?
• What are our key business objectives of the site?
• Who are the people at the intersection of the use cases and business objectives?
• What’s our vision statement for the site?
• What’s our site setting out to achieve?

We also spent some time developing “personas”; a scoping technique we sometimes use which profiles a user via physical characteristics, demographic information, experience level and digital touch points. This gives us a benchmark for user acceptance testing later down the track, asking ourselves; “Would Sam be able to perform this task?”

Grudenites have now been sent off with some homework in order to gather some intelligence on user flows. Mark, (resident Headmaster) will be checking in on us all in the coming weeks to make sure no one skips class for a smoke behind the toilet cubicles, and get the ball rolling on the next phase of scoping.

At our next workshop, we’ll be concentrating on information architecture, content, SEO and task analysis (usability).

Last known coffee count: 10.