OWT web site requirements
Gather and define requirements for a web site.
One World Telecom (OWT) provides a range of telephony and related Internet products to businesses throughout Europe. They wanted a web site and needed help deciding what should be on the site so that they could get quotes from web companies for the site design and construction.
Workshop
Paola ran a one-day workshop at OWT to discuss their web site requirements; a week later they received a written requirements document which they then used to get comparison quotes.
For the first part of the day, we learnt about OWT's services; they have a large number of services and two distinct types of customer: a service provider (aka content provider) who would be familiar with telephony services, and businesses who may not even have heard of all the services.
Goals
It was decided to design three ways to reach pages detailing a product or service:
- a fast track for content providers
- goal-driven scenarios to group products and services
- and a straight-forward list of services and products
This structure accommodates "expert" and "novice" visitors; we first used this multi-path approach to detail on the BarclayNet web site in 1995.
We asked OWT to come up with five clear business goals. The goals would be manifested as graphical buttons on the web site linking to a page for each goal to introduce relevant products and services.
Five goals
Document
A site structure was fleshed out during the day.
After the meeting, Paola completed the information architecture and wrote up the discussions and decisions in a 19-page document.
Goals were to be icon- and colour-coded - each page type would have a consistent structure but web pages for each goal would be visually distinct.
The document was to be sent out to tender - because Paola was not going to be involved during the design and construction of the site, she included general guidelines to ensure that the site could reach the largest number of people in OWT's target audience.
The design guidelines included designating an icon and colour to the main site sections to carry through to navigation and headings for wayfinding. The design by Denison Design included these aspects.
