Day 25: I suppose if you’re the CFO, it might be how much will it cost? But that’s actually five words. If you’re an IT Director, it might be just so you know, IT will be driving this project. But that’s 10 words. Forget all that, the three most important words in a web design project are Know Thy Audience.

Now, every good web design company does some sort of discovery as part of their 5-D process. The really good web design firms place the most emphasis on discovery, but the really, really good web design companies include VOC (Voice-of-Customer) Research as part of their discovery process. How can you know your audience if you don’t spend time talking to them? Specifically, what are their likes and dislikes about your current website, what’s missing that shouldn’t be missing, what do they like about your competitor’s websites, what types of content is most important, and the beat goes on? By not having your web design company do VOC, you might as well be taking the piñata approach to design and development, and content writing, and information architecture, and SEO, and everything else for that matter.

VOC is a tricky business. You need to know how to draft segmented interview guides if your audiences are segmented, you need to know how to interview people in 20 minutes or less but walk away with an hour of information, you need to understand how to synthesize the data and draft audience personas, and like any qualitative research, you need to know how to read between the lines. Always ask for VOC as part of the discovery process. The more discovery and strategy you do upfront, the less you’ll hear the CFO say, “And how much more will this cost?”