Why Do Analysis & Modeling?

• You have tried to engage design and programming teams to develop your ideas for an online-product/application or website, but the ideas are too vague and general to serve as adequate guidance for them to define the scope or estimate cost and schedule, much less to begin the project.
• The envisioned website or online-product lacks adequate definition of such parts of high-level design as user tasks, content, functionality, back-end integration, and organization. This is likely to lead to serious problems with schedule, budget, and software quality.

Methodology

• For the chosen product concept, produce a full conceptual-design and functional definition of the website or online-product/application in terms of user tasks, content, definition and organization of information, and logical functionality, all in enough detail so that the UI designer can detail the concept, and technical staff can plan out and design the software, network architecture, and hardware.
• Organize content and functionality according to Model-View-Controller paradigm, using UML as needed to flesh out the specifications and backend integration.
• Structure the site and organize content in a way that facilitates Search-Engine Optimization, and include functionality that rewards users for referrals or content contributions, or that has teasers or trials. All these factors will make the site online-product/application much easier to market online.
• Ensure that the online-product or website is of high quality: does a good job of helping users achieve their aims, produces genuinely valuable benefits for users, and is superior in these ways to most or all of the alternatives available to them. If it is a product, also ensure that it is quick and easy to buy. All these factors will make the product much easier to sell.
• I use a variety of effective formats to communicate the conceptual design.
• This service is sometimes referred by the industry as “requirements analysis” or “requirements gathering.”
• I avoid the term “requirements” because it implies a mere collecting of fairly obvious specifications (usually just by asking the stakeholders), whereas what is really needed is a creative and skillful working-out of the details of exactly how the site or application will achieve its business and user objectives. This requires a high level of expertise in information quality, organization, and design, as well as in functional analysis and design.

Benefits of This Approach

1. Needed to ensure that the design achieves its business and user objectives
2. A better organized, clearer, more complete specification than is the norm
3. Effectively bridges the gap between the concept and the UI and visual design
4. Enables UI designer to realize the concept correctly
5. Leads to a much better UI design
6. Provides framework for sound version-control
7. Minimizes design errors and problems by catching them earlier
8. Makes communication with other designers and programmers easier
9. Facilitates easy, successful online-marketing
10. Contributes greatly to sellability

Read my Case Study.