Our process is designed to ensure successful projects and foster strong relationships. Developed and honed over years of experience working with many different clients on an ever-evolving range of projects, we’ve distilled a core process that we use to approach our work. Though the process is executed differently based on the type of project, the essential approach is solid and serves as the foundation for all we do.
We start by listening to you. We hold a team kickoff meeting, where we work with you to develop an in-depth understanding of your objectives and challenges. We identify whether there’s additional information needed, and where that might be available. This includes review of existing research, tools, competition, heuristic reviews, stakeholder interviews, or focus groups to uncover user needs and insights. This information will serve as a benchmark to guide our strategy, design, and development efforts. We’ll interpret results and make recommendations that help us strategically develop the right solution for your business problem or objective.
Building on our learnings, we develop a strategy based on business goals and objectives, the needs of identified target audiences, and overall project goals. We deliver a detailed strategy with the right mix of tactics, including recommendations and rationale, evaluated against business goals, technical constraints and target audience needs.
Once strategy is aligned, we begin the design process. We create a fresh, new approach that appeals to your target audience, using colors, images and typography that establish or complement your visual brand. Our designers create concepts that explore the different possibilities for your project and reflect the research and voice of the audience, always with your business goals in mind.
For interactive projects, we begin with a sitemap, which clearly flowcharts all content and functionality, including applications and tools. This serves as the foundation for wireframes, which show a high-level layout of the site or tool, including priorities of communication, user cues and interaction, and screen flow.
We then develop wireframes to visualize the functionality at a page-level view. Wireframes serve as a blueprint of each page type, presenting each individual element of a page, such as navigation, content, interactive elements and imagery. At this stage, we may recommend usability testing to validate the functionality and user experience and identify any issues with the interface before programming begins, as it’s much faster and less expensive to correct issues at this stage.
We utilize either existing content, or develop new content for the project depending on availability and project needs. We work with you to create content that translates the message effectively, and to ensure the language is reflective of your industry and audience and has an authentic voice. We make certain that the voice of the content is consistent, and matches the tone of appropriate distribution channels, from corporate brochures to social media campaigns.
For projects where search engine optimization (SEO) is appropriate, we conduct a strategic keyword analysis, working with an existing list of keywords (if available) and generating new strategic keyword recommendations to effectively drive your target to your site and improve your return on investment. Once the list of keywords is aligned, we optimize site content to effectively reflect the keywords and their appropriate weighting using state-of-the-art best practices for the best possible SEO results.
For interactive projects and applications, we proceed to development. We develop detailed functional and technical specifications which outline how the system will function, what the user flows and interactions will be, how error recovery will flow, and what the system will and won’t do. Critical in the specification is the extensible architecture and foundation of the tool, as this is what enables the system to grow and evolve with your business.
Our programmers build the site or application using the tools and technologies aligned for your environment, leveraging the latest and most appropriate programming languages and platforms and utilizing state-of-the-art best practices for search engine optimization. We then test both internally and externally to validate compliance with W3C accessibility standards.
Once programming is complete, we conduct extensive quality assurance testing to ensure the system is complete and functions as designated in the specifications. Once testing is complete and necessary revisions are made, we stage the site or tool for your review in the actual environment where it will live. This provides you the opportunity to make suggested edits and comments and track updates until the system is complete and ready for launch.
Upon final signoff of the project, we deploy it into the production environment. This may entail us moving the project onto the live server, or working in partnership with your IT group, testing, consulting, and making necessary modifications to ensure successful deployment into the production environment.
We believe that learning from our work is the key to continuous improvement. At the conclusion of a project, we do a formal post-mortem – evaluating and documenting what went well and how we can emulate that success on future projects, as well as went wrong and how we can prevent an issue from recurring. We work with our partners and vendors to gather and incorporate their feedback, as well as a post-mortem with our clients. This 360-degree feedback process gives us a complete picture of what we can do to continue to grow and develop for our clients as well as for our own success.
As your project grows and evolves, Sanger & Eby will be here to provide you with technical support and strategic planning on an ongoing basis – we want to help you to achieve your goals. For a project to succeed, understanding the metrics and how they’re achieved – as well as where they’ve fallen short – is critical. We work with you to establish and maintain key metrics, interpretations, and modifications. We recommend next steps and adjustments, as well as development of future phases and versions as needed. Our success depends on your success. We’re in it for the long haul – just like you are.
Having a strategic approach to process management helps us facilitate consistently and with excellence. We use best in class, time-tested project management and quality assurance practices to ensure we deliver the best result, every time.
Our approach to project management and quality control follows world-class best practices, and facilitates our delivery of excellent quality work that is on time and on budget. We communicate clearly and openly with you throughout the project lifecycle, and believe this straightforward approach mitigates the risk of errors or miscommunication while allowing for the open dialogue with clients that fuels creativity; if issues arise, we’re aware early and communicate accordingly.
We develop a project plan and timeline at the project outset, setting milestones, key deliverables, and checkpoints for the project team. We review the timeline with you to align on expectations and ensure all parties understand their deliverables and timing needed to keep the project on track. We assign a project manager to work in partnership with you on milestones and deliverables.
Ours is a service business, so we have multiple metrics to track and measure quality: Milestones, Time & Action Plan, Online Comments System, Post-Mortem Process, and our internal Employee Recognition Program when we catch each other doing something really great.
We perform quality assurance testing on our work, applying a formal process and best practices to ensure quality and delivery.
But the best evidence of our quality is our client retention rate: at nearly 90%, we’re confident that our professionals are striving to deliver the highest level of service and creative possible. We’re consistently selected by Fortune 500® firms because of our known dedication to designing communication solutions that work.