Research & Analysis

Before ideas are proposed and solutions are built, Shift will seek to understand the needs of your business and stakeholders, and your users.

Our research often starts with stakeholder workshops or interviews to understand business goals and requirements, technical constraints, identify risks, and understand what audiences your website wants to speak to.  Engaging with stakeholders early on also improves overall stakeholder engagement on your project, which often with larger projects is critical to delivery of a successful outcome.

Moving into user research we will flesh out your audiences, understanding what they want to achieve on your site and what your messaging goals for them are.  Shift will do this through a combination of interviews with real users of your website and subject matter expert interviews.  This provides an important benchmark to guide decisions on design, functionality and content as the project progresses.

We conduct analytics reviews to measure success against KPIs and highlight any areas that may need to be revisited for refinement.  These reviews can help form success metrics for your website and create a roadmap for ongoing improvements.

Shift conducts site reviews and usability testing on your existing site to identify quick-win opportunities, as well as areas for further development.  We also adhere to the builder's mantra of "measure twice, cut once".  Throughout design and build we review for usability improvements through user testing to ensure issues are identified before they become too difficult or expensive to fix.

The outputs of these activities will form the requirements for your project which will guide you into the next stage - strategy.

Activities in this phase: user research, usability testing, site reviews, analytics reviews, stakeholder research, business and technical analysis and requirements.