How do you know if your site is serving a purpose?

Most of the time, projects start in one of two ways: either it's a redesign and there's already an existing base and perhaps some defined objectives. In the other case, there's an idea or a concept.

For each project, our aim is to solve a real problem. To do this, we need to identify what makes the project a success. How can we be sure that it is really useful?

The worst thing that can happen is that we are told that the site just needs "a little refresh" or "a facelift".

Not only do we need to determine why we are carrying out this project: what problem needs to be solved, for whom, for what audience, in what conditions of use, but also how do we determine whether our solution works?

Before you start evaluating your website or application, it's essential to define specific objectives. For example, do you want to increase online sales, generate leads, improve brand awareness, provide information to site visitors, etc.?

These objectives must be specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time-bound, as far as possible. (Does the acronym "SMART" ring a bell?)

So we start by defining these objectives, then we design and implement the project in line with them.

At the start of a project, we bring together the project stakeholders for a KPI (Key Performance Indicators) workshop.

After all, who better to determine what will make their project a success than the customers themselves?

The needs of the end-users must of course be taken into account. And we check this throughout the design process.

We use post-its or a collaborative tool (at the moment, Miro is our favourite) and we each list the objectives we have in mind.

Very quickly, a number of areas emerge, for example: brand awareness, business or sales, communication, etc. These are used to group and summarise the objectives.

The next step is to decide how to measure their success. What makes it possible to determine that they have been achieved?

For example, if the most logical objective for an online sales site is to increase sales, we could imagine that to measure this we would look at the number of shopping baskets validated or purchases completed.

For a site offering services, you could measure the number of contacts made: how many forms submitted or clicks on the email address.

We also ask our customers to set a target figure. For example, 10 shopping baskets validated per day, or 300 contacts made per month. If it's a redesign, they potentially have their current figures and the aim of the redesign is to exceed them or make them more qualitative.

Once the objectives, their indicators and the threshold to be reached have been determined, you need to choose a tool to collect your statistics. The most common are Matomo and Google Analytics. We have a very clear opinion on this and the subject deserves an article of its own.

It is vital to define objectives very early on in the project. This enables the usefulness and success of the project to be verified.

These objectives are taken into account throughout the project, in the same way as the needs of the users.

Identifying performance indicators also allows you to measure only what is necessary to check the usability of the project and potentially improve it. By doing this and limiting monitoring, we are more in line with our ethics and respect for the privacy of the people who will be using our creations.