One World Telecom (OWT) provides a range of telephony and related Internet products to businesses throughout Europe. They wanted a web site and needed help deciding what should be on the site so that they could get quotes from web companies for the site design and construction.

We ran a one-day workshop at OWT to discuss their web site requirements; a week later they received a written requirements document which they then used to get comparison quotes.

OWT provides a range of telephony and related Internet products to businesses throughout Europe.

For the first part of the day, we learnt about OWT's services; they have a large number of services and two distinct types of customer: a service provider (aka content provider) who would be familiar with telephony services, and businesses who may not even have heard of all the services.

Business goal statements
(graphic design by Denison Design)

It was decided to design three ways to reach pages detailing a product or service:

a fast track for content providers;
goal-driven scenarios to group products and services and
and a straight-forward list of services and products.

This structure accommodates "expert" and "novice" visitors; we first used this multi-path approach to detail on the BarclayNet web site in 1995.

We asked OWT to come up with five clear business goals. The goals would be manifested as graphical buttons on the web site linking to a page for each goal to introduce relevant products and services.

Each goal was icon- and colour-coded (graphic design by Denison Design)

A site structure was fleshed out during the day. Afterwards, we completed the design and wrote up the discussions and decisions in a 19-page document. Goals were to be icon- and colour-coded - each page type would have a consistent structure but web pages for each goal would be visually distinct.

The document was to be sent out to tender - because we were not going to be involved during the design and construction of the site, We included general guidelines to ensure that the site could reach the largest number of people in OWT's target audience.

The site was eventually designed and constructed by Denison Design.