Planning and Managing Drupal Projects

Project Discovery

The pre-estimate discovery phase (discussed in Chapter 4) gives you a chance to uncover the client’s goals, establish some early functional priorities, and figure out how much work will be involved in creating their site, so you can provide a fair estimate of costs. During the project discovery phase, you’ll add to that knowledge and wade deeper into the client’s business goals, competitive landscape and other factors that will contribute to the design challenge.

The goal of this process is twofold:

1. To get a better understanding of the design challenge you’re facing, and

2. To put together a series of documents that will guide the design process, and to which the client can agree to and sign off.

Getting client sign off on your assumptions is, arguably, the most important part of the discovery process. Whatever your personal opinion of user personas and other types of design documentation, the most important purpose they serve is giving you something to reference in the inevitable event that you have to defend a design decision you’ve made, or redirect a conversation away from “Is it really going to be that shade of blue?”

For example, several years ago I did an e-commerce site for an eco-friendly client. After moving through my standard discovery process and presenting the logo options I had put together, the client had agreed on a specific logo option, and we were ready to move into the next phase of the project. The next day, however, after discussing the logo with ...