Designing The Band: Chapter Two

Starting With Goals

The first thing I did was sit down, with all the great comments and suggestions in mind and work up some goals for this site. In my opinion this is the most important part of any project.

I usually break my goals into three groups. Business goals, user goals and what I call organizational goals. These labels don’t work well for every project, as you’ll see here, but it’s not the label that’s important — it’s the goals behind the label that count.

I came up with five goals for each of these three groups, there could be more, but I wanted to concentrate on a reasonable number to begin with. Let’s start with business goals.

Business goals — These goals usually will relate to the bottom line. They’re very practical and should be the driving force of any Web project. For our purposes, these goals relate to the band, their label and their management.

The five business goals I came up with are:

• Get people (fans and industry) to go to shows
• Get people to buy the album
• Get people to buy merchandise
• Get more exposure (hopefully radio / TV) for the band and the music
• Land a major record label deal

I think those are pretty realistic. I checked with a few of my friends that are in bands and these seem to be reasonable for the most part.

User goals — These are usually pretty obvious, but at the same time hard to pin down. For any kind of commercial site there can be many different user goals.

I tried to draw from my own experience, my previous observations and from the comments you all made in regards to what users of this site might want. I then grouped and boiled them down to a few manageable goals.

The five user goals I came up with are:

• Find tour dates and information
• Get current news about the band
• Listen to music
• Purchase music and/or merchandise
• Connect with other fans

As you may be able to see there are quite a few other goals that could fit here. In addition to creating these user goals I also drew up two user personas. It’s important to identify and get to know your users.

To be honest, normally I wouldn’t use personas on a project like this, but there were so many good use-cases talked about in the comments I didn’t want that to go to waste. Special thanks to Josh King for providing the basis for these.

Plus, personas can be a great way to illustrate secondary goals and give your clients and stakeholders a way to visualize the user. They can help with user advocacy in that way.

The primary persona, Catrina, is that of a “typical” fan that would visit Beauideal’s site. She is familiar with the band, but by no means a super-fan. She represents a pretty large cross-section of the user base for the site.

View Catrina’s persona (gif).

The secondary persona, Dave, represents a few smaller user groups. Those from the music professional segment and a more generic “in-the-know” fan. I added quite a bit of my own experience into the creation of his persona.

View Dave’s persona (gif).

With the user goals and personas in hand have a good basis from which to represent, advocate and design for the user.

Organizational Goals — These are the least concrete of the goals. They relate loosely to both the user and business goals and in many way act as a bridge between them. They are driven by stakeholders, in this case the band members, the label and management, and can cover a wide range of activities. Ease of maintenance, for example, would fall into organizational goals.

The five organizational goals I came up with are:

• Connect and communicate with fans (establish a fan base)
• Easily (and cheaply) maintain and update the site
• Share music
• Gather industry contacts
• Tell the band’s story

Golden Goal Triangle

By taking and balancing all of these three types goals we should be able to create the best possible site for everyone. Web design is about balance and there are places where these goals will oppose each other.

Ideally we’ll be sort those instances out and come up a solution that works well for everyone. I call this the golden triangle — when business, user and organizational goals are in balance with each other.

Yeah, it’s a bit Zen, but it’s worked well for me.

A Simple Plan

Ok, so we’ve got our goals. The next thing I did was create a very simple project plan.

Since this is a fairly small project and we’re not working with real resources and real money, I figured I could cut a few corners here. I created a simple outline, with dates and deliverables attached. In a real project this could become much more complicated, but the focus here is design and frankly this stuff is a bit boring anyway.

Deliverable: A semi-functioning Web site (homepage and prototype templates) with all related files (images, css, scripts if any).

Timeline: To be completed by July 15th. Milestones include:

• June 17th: Goals, project plan, research and findings.
• June 24th: Content outline (IA), wire frames and/or rough mockups, initial identity and typeface study.
• July 1st: Final mockups, rough html prototypes, color and imagery studies.
• July 8th: Rough content, working design, color, type and imagery details, and live user testing.
• July 15: Final homepage design, final templates, final content and final testing.

There, now you have a rough schedule to hold me to! To be honest I tend to work in an unstructured and organic manner and this process shifts quite a bit from job to job. I’d never show a client as detailed a list of milestones as that.

(At least not on this kind of project. Down at the hospital a project plan would be much more complicated.)

In regards to my own design process, as opposed to where I needed something from them, say content, they would typically see one or two important milestones along the way and the date of the final deliverable. I’d show them the rough and final mockups and probably the results of my initial template build, but the rest would be fairly transparent to them, unless they specifically asked to be included.

I’m not the best project planner out there, so I really try and keep the communication flowing, my schedule tight yet flexible and my work open for view or discussion.

But again, it really depends. I also broke this up a bit differently to allow for write-up time and to try and assure none of these posts gets too long. This project could have easily been done in as little as a week’s time under ideal circumstances.

Keep in mind I’ve got to write the posts and I role-play the other side!

Research and Competitive Analysis

As the last part of this initial phase I spent some time researching other similar sites as well as some sites I’d consider the competition.

I feel this is an important step as not only can you garner creative ideas, you can really get a feel for the “market” you’re working in, who is playing in it, what they’re doing and how they’re succeeding.

Or, as in this case, where they are failing.

I looked at about 50 sites this last weekend and the vast majority I’d consider failures when put up against the goals I’ve laid out for this project. Now, I do know what their goals are, so I can’t judge them too harshly — but let’s just say the path we’re about to tread will be an unpaved one.

The best site I found that seemed closest to Beauideal’s market was the Evanescence site. This site has some typical problems that plague many other band sites and will give us a bit of a basis for comparison. It’s not horrible, but it’s not great either.

(Note: They’ve redesigned since this weekend. Went with more Flash. Other than that, not much different.)

Next Steps: IA, Initial Design Mock-ups and Some Identity Stuff

Next week I’ll be talking about the information architecture for this site. I’ll discuss how it supports the various goals and how it’ll provide a framework for our content. It should be pretty simple.

I also plan on touching on content a bit next week, but to be honest I don’t think I’ll spend too much time on the details there. Not that I don’t think it’s important, I just feel the content will be pretty straight-forward.

Once we’ve got the IA down, I’ll get into some rough mockups. This will help us conceive the layout of the homepage. I’ll be presenting those for discussion next week. Also, I’ll share with you some of my ideas for the identity of Beauideal. I’ll have a logo (or probably a typeface) created and a few type, color and image studies to get us started thinking about the look and feel of the site.

Until next week — any comments or questions!?