Process
The first thing we do is listen.
We listen to you explain your goals and objectives and we try to understand your concerns so that, above all else, you’re sure that you’re working with a company that gets it and gets you.
Once we’ve got a clear vision of what we need to achieve together on your project, we embark on four-phase process to understand, design, develop, and deploy your site or application.
Understand
Strategy
Specification and requirements gathering are fundamental to projects big and small. Other than understanding the scope of a project determined by its objectives, time line and budget, we talk at length with our clients about how to achieve the end goals and how to ensure the business rules are met and the functionalities are delivered. This phase is critical to a project’s success.
Plan & Design
Information Architecture & Requirements
We’re experts in planning for large scale projects web and application development projects that have complex content modeling needs. Even mobile web development projects need an information architecture to ensure that all the project’s stakeholders have agreement and input into the project’s structure and direction. We create sitemaps to outline the broad structure of the project, and then we create a set of well-annotated wireframes and a corresponding functional requirements document (if necessary) to show how the site’s or application’s pages will be built and how. How the content is organized and designed in terms of layout is tantamount to the content itself.
Design
Once the information architecture has been approved after multiple iterations, only then is the site’s visual design—it’s look and feel—created. Representative pages can either be designed in static Photoshop, Fireworks, Illustrator or InDesign files, or they can be created in high-fidelity HTML, CSS, and JavaScript pages to get a glimpse at how the final product will look and behave.
Develop
Build-out
With the planning and design phase deliverables approved, Factory Interactive developers do what they do best, build your website or application. We show you progress along the way as we build the site on Factory’s staging servers.
Testing
Once the site or application framework has been established, we begin to test it using live scenarios and real content. We test in all major web-browsers and, where possible, ensure graceful degradation for older browsers if that is a concern for our clients.
Another testing phase of the project which can take place in both development and, ideally, in the planning and design stage, is basic usability testing. While this stage is often excluded from projects in an effort to keep costs down, it is extremely important in determining where problems lie in the design of a site. Factory Interactive has a lot of experience in this area too.
Deploy
Rollout
When the site has been built to completion on our staging servers, we move the site to its final location. We can work with your existing IT team, or we can take care of it for you.
Training
As part of every project, we’ll train you on how manage and work with your new site or application. And don’t worry, we’re always here as your partner to ensure that if you ever get stuck, or need refinements or enhancements to what’s been delivered, we’ll help you.
Analysis
We’ll use an easily integrated analytics package—Google or whichever you choose—to determine how the project is doing out there in the wild. We’ll use this information to figure out what’s working and what isn’t when it comes to your presence on the internet and how people are finding you.
