What is the B2B website discovery phase and why you need it?
For us as a B2B web design agency, when it comes to designing a website, one of the most essential steps is the discovery phase.
This phase is the first step in the website design process, it involves working closely with the client to deep dive into their business, their goals, and their target audience. It can include a combination of research, analysis, and workshops, and ultimately helps to set the foundation for the entire website design process.
The website discovery phase is all about understanding the client's business and figuring out what they need from their website, or it might even be that they don’t need a website and actually need an intranet or other digital product. This is the time when designers and developers gather all the necessary information and data to ensure that they create a product that meets the client's expectations.
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The discovery phase is typically broken down into several steps:
Gather information
The first step is to gather information about the client's business. This should ideally include a face-to-face session with the key stakeholders in the business and also conduct some of your own background research. The purpose is to learn more about their products or services, what the website needs to do, their target audience, and any sticking points with their current website.
With your client’s help you should also look at their competitors, they know their business the best. Find out what they like or dislike about their competitor’s websites and try to understand what sets the client apart from their competition so that the website can reflect this unique value proposition.
Define goals
The next step in the discovery phase is to define the goals of the website. This involves understanding what the client wants to achieve with their website and what functionality is needed to make it happen. Is it to generate leads, increase sales, educate, or build brand awareness?
Defining these goals will then help you to identify the metrics needed to support achieving them such as, increasing the number of page views, reducing bounce rates, building email contact lists, or improve search rankings are just a few.
Review current offering
Taking some time to review the analytics for your client's current website can provide some valuable information. It will help you to understand how their current website is performing, including data on website traffic, user behaviour, and conversion rates. By analysing this data, you can identify areas for improvement and gain insights into what is working well and what needs to be changed.
This information can help inform decisions about the design and functionality of the new website, ensuring that it is optimised for success. Additionally, reviewing analytics can help set benchmarks for performance, allowing you to measure the success of the new website against the old one.
Create user personas
We shouldn’t even think about designing navigation and page layouts until we have created user personas. Personas are fictional representations of the client's potential customers or website users. They help you to understand the needs, desires, and pain points of the users, which in turn helps to inform the design process.
By having a good idea about the potential users, you can ensure the website will provide the best user experience and meets the needs of the target audience.
Build a sitemap and wireframes
The final step of the discovery phase is to create a sitemap and wireframes. A sitemap is a visual representation of the website's structure, documenting page hierarchy and links between pages.
Wireframes are basic sketches of each page of the website, it helps to simply demonstrate how the content and functionality will be laid out on the page.
Overall, the website discovery phase sets the stage for the rest of the design process by establishing a clear understanding of the client's needs, goals, and objectives.
By investing time and resources in this phase, the client will be confident that they will be delivered a website that is effective, efficient, and aligned with their business objectives.
