We always refer to this phase as the most crucial part of any project - serving as the foundation and reference for all steps that follow.  Project Discovery helps us understand the scope and plan for project deliverables. A thorough discovery process helps us understand your online goals, target audience, industry and competition. This phase consists of the following steps:

• Project Questionnaire – a thorough document which defines the goals and objectives of the project, target audience, overall marketing messages, customer perception and competitive landscape.
• Audience Survey – Friendly customers are interviewed to capture relevant feedback and identify any gaps that may be missing in our strategy. Any information collected will be aggregated and reviewed with you, and then feed back into the project. This is a crucial step in ensuring the new site will be a success with it’s target audience.
• Persona Development -  Know your users!  Information collected from interviews with you and/or the audience surveys is tranformed into a Persona, a fictitious description of a typical user of your website, defining demographic and psychographic information.  This serves as an amazing tool in helping designers and developers understand your users behavior in much greater detail.   The more we know about your users, the better solution can be built.
• Competitive Analysis - Understanding your competition is a key piece in correctly positioning yourself online. 
• High Level Requirements - Basic identification of client requirements.  A more thorough Project Requirements Definition (PRD) process which documents specific functional requirements (data elements, logic, presentation, adminstration and reporting) is available separately.