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During the kick-off meeting, you begin to develop an understanding of how your internal team views the current Web site and the project to develop a new site. It is important to understand internal perceptions of the scope, vision, goals, users, and content in order to work out any differences within the team and to move everyone into the same plan for your new site.

A very important part of this understanding is to see:

• who your team members think of as the audiences
• what they think are the users’ main scenarios
• how well they think the current site meets the audiences’ needs

As you Evaluate Your Current Site, Learn About Your Users, and Conduct Task Analysis, you will want to consider any differences between what you find and what your team thinks. If reality is different from what the team thinks, it is critical to make sure the team understands what you learn and adjusts its plans to match the realities.

You can download Questions to Ask at Kick-Off-Meetings (DOC - 157KB) (PDF - 33KB) to help you learn how your internal team percieves the site and its users.

Next steps

Different action items for different people may come out of the kick-off meeting. A few of the action items should definitely be to Evaluate Your Current Site and to Learn More About Your Users.

To ensure that your project goes smoothly and is successful, you must assemble a project team with the right mix of skills.

How many people you need depends, of course, on the scope of your project. You may find that one person has the skills to fill more than one of the roles we list below or you may need several people for some of these roles.

Some of the skill sets or roles you need to fill, include:

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Next steps

If you do not have all these skills in-house, you may want to get outside help. For help in hiring usability skills, consult the articles on Write a Statement of Work (SOW) and Hire a Usability Specialist.

Once you have all the team members assembled, you are ready to Hold a Kick-Off Meeting.

Learn about users

A public Web site is available to everyone. But “everyone” is not necessarily the best definition of the audiences for your site. Think specifically about the people you want to attract to your site.

You almost certainly have customers you want to target, probably several different groups of customers. List those groups.

Decide on your target audiences. Sometimes it is useful to think of your target audiences by roles in relationship to the site. A classic division for e-commerce sites is “browsers” and “buyers.” For another, targeted audiences might be divided by type; for example:

• researchers outside the agency
• researchers inside the agency
• other staff in the division
• non-research staff elsewhere in the agency

Conduct a task analysis

Verify or challenge your assumptions about users. Thinking about users only gets you so far in designing a successful site. Your thinking brings out your assumptions about the users. To learn about users’ reality, you need to get out and meet them, work with them, and involve them in helping you to understand their:

• needs for information
• ways of thinking about, grouping, and organizing information
• expectations about your site
• levels of knowledge about the subject matter
• levels of experience with the Web and similar types of sites

By working with users, you can gather many realistic scenarios and learn what makes a Web site work or not work for them.

Let users help you build the site for them. Many useful techniques have been developed to get useful information from users and about users before you design a site.