Understanding requirements

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When you’re building a site, it’s important to understand the client’s requirements. These cover creative requirements, technical requirements and content requirements.

1. Creative requirements Think about the site’s visual look and feel. The branding that needs to be applied, the colour scheme, and the agency’s creative requirements. What sort of websites do they like (a mood board with sample designs might help here). Ideally, you should also bring user research into the site building to understand the site’s audience and help you create personas and user pathways.

2. Technical requirements Think about the required functionality and how this maps to GovCMS. Which modules will you be using? Do you need to integrate with third-party APIs? At this stage, you’ll also need to decide whether GovCMS SaaS or PaaS is a better fit.

3. Content Requirements GovCMS comes with six content types out-of-the-box. While these content types are designed for government, you may need additional content types. Will your site use blocks? Think about the site’s taxonomy. You should also consider the content editors/users to work out what roles you’ll need and whether you’ll need content moderation workflow

Establishing requirements

The steps below provide a high-level overview of establishing requirements:

• Define the minimum viable product (MVP)

• Build a roadmap: Decide what are the features beyond the MVP? Identify features that are “low hanging fruit” - easy to build with high business value

• Set measurable goals so you can measure the project’s success

• Review the current systems

• Consider mobile devices and establish WCAG compliance requirements

• Research the editor types required for the site, and any approval workflow that’s required

• Who are the site visitors (the audience)? Consider setting up personas for your site visitors

• Define the minimum set of permissions and roles