Overview

When will the client consider the site to be successful? How can we measure success? This phase and the next, User Needs and Task Analysis, are closely related. Both are derived from the Web Site Objectives and Project Scope.

What's in this module

1. What is Success?
2. Step 1: Identifying and Prioritizing Goals
3. Step 2: Can Goals be Measured Before Launch?
4. Step 3: Assigning Measurable Outcomes to Pre-Launch Goals

Success is when goals are met or exceeded. In order to measure success, we need to be very specific about the goals. This will require a great deal of interaction with the client, the purpose of which is to understand the client's hopes for the site. It is necessary to know which goals matter most to the client - which goals count most in the client's opinion.

It is the design team's responsibility to restate the client's goals for the site in ways that are as measurable as possible. Many clients have a general idea of what the site should be doing, but have no experience in stating those goals in ways that can be measured. But the design team needs to be able to measure as many goals as possible.

Of course this lets the team know when the client's site is successfully completed, but in addition, the team needs to be able to prioritize tasks. Prioritizing is necessary when resources run short and the client's goals can't all be realistically met. Measuring success lets the team identify goals that are largely, if not completely, met; the degree of success can be balanced against the priority of the goal to help decide where resources are best spent.

Identifying Goals

The site's "Objectives and Project Scope" document is the starting place for the list of goals. From its prose, you would extract a list of goals. The process should be a team activity, to make sure everyone on the team has input on this important matter.

Example:

The Stony Creek Historical Museum's "Objectives and Project Scope," from W78b:

From this paragraph, the design team extracted a list of goals and sent them in an email to the Public Relations Director, Sherry Moore, who is the team's liason at the museum:

After receiving Serry Moore's reply, the list was revised and prioritized (shown here with Sherry's additions in italics and deletions struck through):

Some goals are easy to measure; others are more difficult. And some of the goals that can be measure must wait until after the site is launched and has had a chance to be made known.

Here are some examples of goals that can be measured, either before or after launch:

Measurable Before Launch

Measurable After Launch

For each of the goals identified by the development team and approved by the client, the development team needs to decide which can be measured before launch, and how they can best be measured. It may be a good idea to have more than one way of measuring a goal.

The success criteria will be the foundation for the usability test plan (Phase L) as well as the overall measure of the success of the project, so they should be written carefully and examined by all team members. The examples above can serve as a model.

1. Individual team members get their part of this assignment to the Team Leader by email attachment, or some other method mutually agreed upon in discussion.
2. Team Leader makes sure all documents in the milestone of which this is a part are gathered together in a compatible form.
3. Team Leader and/or content specialist check for correct spelling and English usage.
4. Team leader verifies that material submitted meets the requirements.
5. Team leader or content specialist FTP the material to the team's Web site, informing the instructor and other team members by emailing to them the URI.