Industry audit and competitive review
You may in many ways be without peer, but there are always competitors for the attention of your audience. Identifying top peers and reviewing their respective content helps you get a wider perspective both on what potential listeners, members, and donors will be seeing and what seems to be working for others— we can start thinking together about where to emulate and where to differentiate, informing all of our work together.
Content strategy
Building on the review of peers, Agaric will work with you to briefly interview current and potential clients and develop personas and user stories.
Content style guide
Along with bringing consistency to cooperative output (and saving time sweating the details every time they come up), a good content (copywriting) style guide incorporates suggestions for clear and effective writing and helps your unique aspects shine through. It can help tell your story in a consistent way and help let your individual personalities show through while maintaining collective coherence.
User research and testing
Agaric applies a Lean UX Research methodology to answer critical user experience questions with relevant, meaningful, and actionable data.
From reviewing your goals and audiences we recommend answering the following questions:
- What prevents users from becoming paying subscribers or sustaining donor members on the site?
- What features would enable users to invite friends to become supporters?
- Who is most engaged? least engaged?
- Which conversion goals are being met? unmet?
- What new audience do we want to reach?
We recommend and use the following research and testing approaches:
- A/B testing
- Brand audit
- Browser and device analysis
- Competitive analysis
- Content audit
- Contextual inquiry
- Heat map analysis
- Heuristic evaluation
- Site analytics review
- SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) analysis
- Usability testing
- User interviews
- User surveys
Not all will fit the purpose or budget of every part of a project, but good insights into what to build and why is more valuable than simply building well and quickly.
User testing & revisions
We always recommend at least one round dedicated to measuring and improving. Using analytics and user tests, we identify what is working, what is not and needs to be changed, and what is missing and needs to be built. We then build on the previous work to do the fixes and enhancements with the highest expected impact.
