New Media Development Process v.01

1. Discovery Phase: Understanding the target customers and their needs, and conceptualizing the business goals for the web site.
   1. Customer Analysis Document : Identifies target customers and their needs (people, tasks, technology, and social issues)
   2. Business Analysis Document: Identifies the business goals of the project and the value proposition.
   3. Specification Document: Identifies the features that the web site should provide for customers when the work is completed.
2. Exploration Phase:  Generating rough initial web site designs, of which one or more will be chosen for further development.
   1. Medium Fidelity Site Maps, Storyboards, and Schematics
3. Refinement Phase: Polishing the navigation, Layout, and flow of the selected design.
   1. High Fidelity Site Map, Storyboard, and Schematic
4. Production Phase: Developing a fully interactive prototype and a design specification.
   1. Design Document: how the web site works in detail.  This takes features from the Specification Document created earlier and combines the Site Maps, Storyboards, and Schematics to describe the flow of interaction.
   2. Interactive Prototypes: Skeletal web site with artificial information in placeholders and simplified or substituted dynamic content.
   3. Technical Specifications: includes items such as type of web server, kind of programming and scripting languages, kind of database, version of HTML, etc.
5. Implementation Phase:  Developing the code, content, and images for the website.
   1. Completed Web Site: all code, database tables, software, etc.
   2. Maintenance Document: describes in detail, how to maintain the completed web site.
   3. Test Plan Document: Spells out what steps will be taken to ensure the web site works as intended.  Will have a direct correlation to the features called out in the Specification Document.
   4. Updates: Updated copies of any previous deliverable if applicable.
6. Launch: Deploying the web site for actual use.
7. Maintenance Phase: Supporting the existing site, gathering and analyzing metrics of success, and preparing for the next redesign.
   1. Periodic Web Site Metrics: Metrics are derived from the Business Analysis Document and the deliverable is the actual scores against those standards.
   2. Bug Reports: Identification, resolution plan, and effort estimate for any bugs discovered.
   3. Periodic Backups: either provided by host or Geo InSight if hosted by Geo InSight

Notes:

• Storyboards are also called wire frames and simply show a site page series.  These are used in the production for layout references. Usually a Visio Drawing set.  Could be substituted with Activity Diagrams.
• Site Maps show the pages in relation to each other.  Usually a Visio also.
• Schematics is a general term and may be any number of items.  Typically this will include activity diagrams for application portions of a site, style guides (Adobe PSD with samples and hex values of proposed site colors, etc), sample logos, bylines, etc.
• Fidelity means the quality or fineness of the items.  Low is hand drawn on paper, medium is computer based with very little detail, no color, etc.  High is full color and near production quality, though still an image or mock up, not coded.
• All documents may range from memo style with bullet lists to dissertations, depending on budget and need.