WEM Strategy: Is Your Web Project Going Well? How to Tell

By Ahava Leibtag (@ahaval) May 16, 2011

How do you know you’re hitting your marks in a Web project?

The goal of this series is to identify how different subspecialties in UX can inform each other about their own well-developed processes so we can create some best practices around Web projects. You can read Part One, which focused on best practices in general, and last week’s column “Web Engagement Strategy: Aligning Deliverables to Project Goals.”

My panel includes:

Chris Moritz, Content Strategist/Information Architect (@chrismoritz)
Jeffrey Rum, Visual Designer (@jsrum)
Daniel Eizans, Content Strategist (@danieleizans)
Alice Coleman, Information Architect
Randall Snare, Content Strategist (@randallsnare)
Michael Hogenmiller, Visual Designer (@mhogenmiller)

You’ll find my takeaways at the bottom of the panelists’ answers. Thank you to my talented and fantastic panelists.

Q: What benchmarks do you use along the way to insure the project is going well?

Chris Moritz, Content Strategist and IA

Chris checks in with different specialists on a project to make sure things are running smoothly.

Working in a great team of kick-ass specialists has its benefits — the account supervisor tends to client politics, the project manager to time utilization, the finance manager to billing and burn rate, the analytics specialist to performance dashboards, the social media analyst to sentiment analysis reporting, etc. Along with staying abreast of these and other outputs from other colleagues, I check in with key team members throughout the project lifecycle to see how he or she is holding up. Is she still excited about the project? Did he find the up-stream deliverables useful? What has she been hearing from the stakeholders? These “sense of the project” inquiries give me a better feel for how things are going than a quantitative regression analysis. I leave that in the capable hands of folks who didn’t pursue the humanities in school.

Jeff Rum, Visual Designer

Benchmarks are different for each project. Typically, though, the following deliverables must be approved by the client. In my book, each approval is an important milestone.

Project Summary and Technical Specifications — These help reduce the “I was under the impression that…” discussions later on in the project. I’ll never forget a client that once told me right before launch, “When are we going to see the Chinese version of the site?” This was never discussed and I was able to go back to the specifications to prove it.
Information Architecture
Wireframes — the wireframes are where many designers fall short. I like to design wireframes that are not only basic framed outlines of the web pages, but identify and show the client some imagination and vision of how the site will look, feel and function — without spending a lot of time in Photoshop.
Visual Design — Finally, the client must approve a visual design direction before we can develop and start coding the site. I refuse to start coding even if the client is still debating the color of the logo.

Daniel Eizans, Content Strategist