When building a new website, it’s often best to gather your requirements up front. Without a clear understanding of these requirements, it’s hard to know just what you’re trying to build, who the target audience is for the project, and what you will ultimately need to succeed in your endeavor. The design process can be incredibly complicated in itself, and it’s important to start with a thorough understanding of the goals and expectations for everyone involved in the project. This process is called requirements gathering.
“But I’m building my website with Wix, so I don’t have to think about these complicated details,” you might be thinking. “I just want to build something quick that still looks beautiful.”
A new site with Wix, or one made with other low code tools, can still benefit from a modified version of the traditional requirements gathering process. Taking time to form a plan can help focus your vision, identify pitfalls, define your user experience goals, and ultimately allow you to deliver your product to market successfully and in a more cost-efficient way.
Laying out a strategy
The requirements gathering process can vary based on the level of detail, complexity, and risk demanded by your site, and your strategies will be unique to your website. Let’s walk through a simple example outlining what this process can look like and how it can improve the development process for your new website.
First, think about what you are building. What would you say to someone who asked what you needed a website for?
Say that I am a salon owner with a wellness shop and studio. Yoga teachers, skin care professionals and other wellness practitioners work out of the studio, and I want a site that allows people to book appointments, purchase products, and read our blog posts on self-care and other wellness topics. We’re also really active on social media, and I want to be able to promote seamlessly on those platforms.
Once you’ve determined what you’re building, you can start to outline the specific needs of the project. This can be a great activity in a team setting, but can also be done on your own as a solo business owner. One way to approach this is to think about the workflow someone would take coming to your website. What steps would they take to accomplish their goals? This process is called a user journey, and it can be an incredibly useful exercise. You can imagine these user journeys on your own, with a team, or by talking to real patrons of your business that are already likely to support you in your transition online.
An example user journey:
A user loads the site in their browser. They see a link in the navigation bar to book an appointment.
After clicking this link, they’re taken to a new page which asks them to sign up for an account, or log into a preexisting account they already might have with the business.
The user logs into their account and is prompted by an interactive calendar that allows them to select a date and time for their appointment based on the studio’s availability.
After they select a date and time, the user is asked to provide their credit card information to secure their appointment.
Once the information is confirmed to be accurate, they are sent a confirmation email with the date and time of the upcoming appointment.
If they don’t already have an account, the user is also provided with the option to create a profile, which would keep their credit card information and personal details on file and allow them to book appointments more quickly in the future.
Thinking this way helps give us a better understanding of what our website needs. In this case, we want to make sure that our site has:
Secure login and members area
Appointment bookings
Secure payment processing
Email notifications
Social media integration
Next, we want to determine how our new site can provide a solution to the challenges raised by the design journey. In the example above, our user would want to explore Wix Bookings, Members Area, and Wix Stores. These apps can help our business owner evaluate whether or not the site they envision will require a custom solution outside of the features offered as part of the Wix ecosystem.
User journeys can also show what tests your site will require to ensure that everything you envisioned at the beginning works exactly as expected.
The Bottom Line
These all may seem like simple ideas, and they should be!
There’s no single way to approach the requirements gathering process for a low-code website. But if you approach the web development process with a clear understanding of the user experiences you want your site to facilitate, you can determine the scope of the project up front. This will tell you whether or not you need a custom Velo solution, and allow you to focus your vision.
To recap, these are the goals of our requirement gathering process:
Define the purpose and goals for your site: What am I building? Why am I building it?
Map out your user journeys: Who is using my website? How are they using it?
Define pages, page elements, built-in apps, code needs: What do I need to make my vision a reality?
Requirements gathering is an incredibly useful tool to streamline the design process, ensuring that the experience of your users matches your intended goals, no matter what you’re building. Choosing a low code/no code solution such as WiX cuts out many of the traditional parts of the requirements gathering process increasing the speed at which you can bring your ideas to life. Test out these ideas on your next website and make something you can be proud of.
