What is a website discovery?
Website discovery is an often-mandated and crucial phase of developing a new website, system or service, particularly when considering projects with scale, complex integrations or audiences, or involves public funding.
Investing time and effort in diagnosing user challenges, providing actionable insights, and understanding the technological, creative and marketing options available, a digital discovery enables you to define a more considered scope of requirements.
Ultimately this helps to streamline process, reduce project wastage and improve project outcomes.
The Spindogs approach to discovery
- Insights - Unbiased situation analysis & insights
- Exploration - Inclusive exploration and comprehension
- Definition - Defined, clear and actionable outcomes
The power of three flows through Spindogs’ DNA, and is not limited to Discovery. Our philosophy is founded on three-dimensional thinking: the inclusion of a key third voice, your audience, to our client relationships, and the application of three viewpoints, technical advantage, marketing performance and brand strength to all projects. This approach ensures that our Discovery recommendations are more considered and the outcomes are ultimately more successful.
Best practice recommendations informed by data
The Insights phase of discovery is designed to arm us with an unbiased snapshot of your current digital status.
Taking in and learning from your immediate competition ensures we can objectively compare, and provides a relatable jumping off point for discussions around content, brand and functionality. This is supported by a series of creative and technical audits – including our unique competitor benchmarking and page scoring tools – and is designed to assess both current performance and identify gaps and areas for improvement.
Interactive stakeholder engagement
Our Exploration discovery phase has the sole aim of providing actionable outcomes from which to launch your new project.
Incorporating stakeholder workshops, interviews and surveys, we use our Insights report to provoke discussion, enabling our team of specialists to draw informed conclusions and make recommendations across all project touchpoints. From interactive user journey and site mapping exercises to open-ended discussion and investigation about functionality, Exploration is a great opportunity to engage key internal and external stakeholders with your project.
Clear and actionable website scoping
Drawing on our initial Insights stage and informed by discovery Explorations, the Definitions phase leaves you with a clear set of briefs and briefing assets, detailed delivery requirements and considered plans for implementation.
Collating our recommendations into a single Discovery Report, we playback our findings and observations in a collaborative session that walks you through our rationale, providing reference where required. The Discovery Report document can easily be adapted into an external brief or an internal schedule of works once finalised.
Yes, we have undertaken a number of government and government-adjacent web discovery projects, and the methodology is designed to provide an actionable set of recommendations that enable you to confidently take your web or systems project to the next stage of procurement or implementation.
No, our discovery methodology can be tailored and applied to a range of other digital projects, although they tend to require a more focused set of specialist deliverables or the delivery of discovery phases in isolation. We regularly provide web applications or systems discovery for global clients, where Exploration is key. Similarly we can support with discovery for mobile apps or inform marketing campaigns through Discovery Insights.
Absolutely. Our digital discovery process is designed to be standalone, with clearly actionable outcomes at the end of the process, that could be shared with an alternative delivery provider or form the basis of a tender document.
However, the majority of our discoveries are linked to Spindogs-delivered website projects, and where possible we will ensure a consistency of resourcing across the discovery and delivery teams to ensure the knowledge gained through discovery is applied to its fullest.
We are keen advocates of getting as involved as possible! Augmenting the discovery deliverables with additional insight gathering activities such as internal surveys or persona building help to build ownership of the project internally, and serve to enhance our activities.
Due to its comprehensive and detailed nature, Spindogs’ Discovery is typically aimed at larger, more complex projects, for organisations with the resource to fully support stakeholder engagement or where mandated through use of public funding. However, all websites do benefit from considered audience or market research as well as best practice implementation, and our digital marketing services are designed to assist you in specific areas such as UX auditing or competitor benchmarking.