Our digital process

We’ll ask you to fill out a copy of our brief form before our discovery meeting.

In that meeting we’ll ask questions expanding on your brief, so we understand the context for your project, and what success looks like for you.

Questions we ask include:

• What do you hope to achieve?
• What do you like and hate about your current solution?
• What do your customers want to get out of this digital tool?
• What third party systems do you need to integrate?
• What digital skills and resources do you have in house?

Scoping your project confirms we’ve understood your brief correctly and makes sure we’re all on the same page. We sum up what we understand, suggest high level solutions, and estimate.

Prices include:

• Strategy and project management in NZ.
• Development in Sri Lanka and NZ.

We’ll be transparent about how we calculate these costs.

Some digital challenges require more detailed exploration to come up with the best solution for your business, so if your project is complex we’ll give you a price range. We do our best to estimate within five working days.

Once you’ve signed off your estimate, we work with you to prepare a detailed scope for your project, so we’ve a clear plan of action.

This detailed scope may include:

• A site map showing how your digital tool will be structured.
• User stories that show ways your customers will use your tool.
• Diagrams that show how your tool will work.
• Details of how other digital tools will be connected.

We’ll work closely with you, explaining how things could work, discussing your options, and making sure you’re happy with the solutions we propose.

When the scope is complete, we ask you to approve it before we build. We use Agile project management methodology, so your scope may evolve as your project progresses, but projects start far more efficiently when we’ve all agreed on the first steps.

We start design with interactive, clickable wireframes, so you can navigate around the skeleton of your website or digital tool and see how it works. Once you’re happy with your wireframes we start designing the look.

Before we design, we make sure we know what you like and what you don’t. Design is a collaborative process, so we show you work in progress, and check in as we go. Your estimate includes two rounds of edits.

When we start to build, most projects are scheduled in weekly sprints. We plan work each week, allocate developers, and let you know what to expect.

The first few weeks, we won’t have much to show. That’s because we’re building those parts behind the scenes that make everything work smoothly. As soon as we start the front end, we start to share progress.

We use the Agile project management methodology, which means we build things iteratively. We build, we test, we improve.

Depending on the complexity of your project, we might schedule weekly meetings or send a weekly update. With larger projects we use project management tools Trello and Jira, so you’ll be able to see progress, and make your own requests.

Most changes are part of the iterative development process and included in your scope. If you request something new we haven’t discussed that takes significant time, we’ll send you an updated price.

Once we start sharing progress with you, testing begins.

We test our work in three ways:

1. White box testing where we review the backend of your site. The way we build is as considered as the design of your digital tool.
2. Black box testing where we test the tool like a user.
3. Automated testing where we write programs to test larger projects.

When we’re sure everything’s doing what it’s supposed to do, it’s time to add content. You can load content yourself, or we can do it for you. We’ll ask you about this at the beginning of your project.

This is also when you start to proof and test thoroughly at your end, logging any bugs and change requests using your project management tool.

Launching a new digital tool has its own to-do list. We’ll agree a launch plan with you, which will be different if you’re planning a soft launch or a high profile launch. We can also provide hosting.

When your new digital tool goes live, you’ve a 30-day post go-live guarantee, where we fix any bugs you find, as part of the project.

After your launch, you can choose to move to a support plan. We offer three affordable monthly support packages, which you can use to evolve your digital tool and get advice.