On Monday we kicked off with the first major session for the website redevelopment project. Deeson delivers a project blueprint session as part of all major website projects. The goal is to get under the skin of the organisation and explore the strategic aims of both the organisation and the project.
Where are we heading? What is the organisation’s vision and strategy?
Before the session, Deeson interviewed some the Senior level stakeholders. These interviews focused on what the project needs to achieve for the organisation. Including, results that the website would need to deliver and any potential challenges.
When looking at the University’s vision and strategy, much of our discussions focused on our top level ambitions. For example, our drive to be a £200m institution by 2020. We also discussed the development of the Industrial Gateway concept with the aim to make collaborative working with businesses easier.
Who are our key audiences?
Next, we moved on to the most important element we need to focus on: who are our key internal and external audiences?
This session served as an overview of who uses our website and has provided the foundations for determining how to communicate with each user group. Starting at this point provides a basis for further research and insight generation, ensuring we deliver what our target customers want and need.
Additionally, we discussed what each user group would use our website for, drawing comparisons with car showrooms – University of Derby test-drive anyone?
So what are we trying to achieve?
With our key audiences determined and our strategy blueprint outlined we then moved on to nail down what our website needed to deliver to support theses objectives. We established that we need to work towards delivering:
- A website that wins hearts and minds through speaking to our prospects in a way that excites and engages them about the learning experience at the University of Derby.
- Helps us to continue to secure top academic talent and tell their stories in a way that supports student recruitment and enhances the student experience.
- Have the best, most effective website that we can have!
It’s fair to say that the session had been intense, exhausting but hugely confidence inspiring. Moving forward, the outputs of the session will now inform to add detail to the delivery plan. It will also inform the rounds of user research that will follow.
What’s next?
From here we start to delve into the detail. We will be running a workshop that will dive into the technology and resource available to deliver the new website. Alongside this, another workshop will dig deeper into our core audiences with colleagues from across the University.
To follow on from this there will be a session run by Deeson’s Creative Director, Andrew. The ‘The Art of the Possible’ session will aim to open our eyes to what we could deliver as part of this project.