Website Discovery Questions

Updated 03/18/2022

If you’ve done your job during the sales process, you’ll have a solid understanding of what you’re building when a project kick offs. Knowing what is important, but there is still more to learn before you can actually start designing. Finding the right design approach requires a unique line of questions.

We’re always evolving our design discovery process. We’ve found the more informed you are at the start of a project the more successful the end result. Getting the right information is a product of asking the right questions. At 3.7 DESIGNS, we’re always monitoring, adjusting and updating our questions.

We commonly ask the following questions during our design discovery process.

Background

1. What is your primary objective for this project?
   1. How will we measure success? What are the KPIs?
   2. Where are you at now?
2. Do you have any other objectives? Can you rank them by priority?
   1. How will we measure success? What are the KPIs?
   2. Where are you at now?
3. Is there anything about your existing website that doesn’t work well?
4. Is there anything about your existing website that works particularly well?

Stakeholders

1. Who individually, or what departments have a vested interested in the outcome of this project?
2. What is most important to them?
3. Can you rank them in terms of priority?

Users

Segmentation

1. What different groups of people do you anticipate using your site?
2. What is the priority of these groups?

Per segment

1. Give me a brief 1min background about who these people are?
2. What are they trying to accomplish?
3. What’s motivating them?
4. What are their pain points?
5. What questions do they have?
   1. About their problem?
   2. About your solution to their problem?
   3. About your company?
   4. About the process or logistics?
6. What objections do they have?
7. How do they make a decision?
8. What first triggers a realization that they need for a product or service like yours?
9. How does your product / service uniquely and best solve their problems?
10. What does their entire buyers journey look like?
11. Where do they spend their time digitally?
12. How technologically savvy are they?

Competitors

1. Who are your direct competitors?
2. What makes you different?
3. Can you rank the competitors in terms of closeness?
4. Are there any non-direct competitors? (i.e. alternative products or services.)

Branding

1. Do you have any brand guidelines?
2. Do you have official brand typefaces?
3. Do you have official brand colors?
4. Is there a style, tone or specific imagery we should consider?
5. What archetype does your brand align with?

Communication

1. If you could only deliver a visitor one message, what would it be?
   1. If you could deliver two more messages, what would they be?
2. How would you describe your brand culture?
3. What is your brand mission?
4. Describe the personality of your brand? What do you sound like? Look like?
5. How do you want your audience to feel after interacting with you?
6. What makes you radically unique?

Making Design Discovery Work

The direct answer to many of these questions is less important than the discussion that they spur. Your goal is to get the client comfortable enough where they’re able to elaborate and provide in-depth answers. It’s critical you fully understand the answers as well, it’s not enough to take notes and make assumptions.

Also, pay attention for opportunities to dig deeper. Some questions will have quick answers where others will turn into entire conversations. Much of the golden insight is found in the later.

If you’re looking for help with your next website redesign, give us a shout. We have over 15 years of experience in WordPress development, user experience design, search engine optimization and graphic design.