luxury hotel rooms MikonosSportBrain was a my first serious foray into the dot com arena and my first project with Maus Haus.

SportBrain came Maus Haus flush with $12 million in venture capital and an idea to link an advanced pedometer to a web based application.

Our first task was to work with the founders of SportBrain to refine their business plan and how the SportBrain experience would be presented on the Internet.

Fitness data was gathered by the SportBrain, a small device positioned as the "first wearable sports computer. From there the data was uploaded to the clients servers and the SportBrain website would allow the user to check the cycles of their daily exercise and be able to graph/compare their activity to other individuals and groups. At the same time the collected information could be used for different marketing schemes and projections. A "reward system" was also put in place which allowed users to win prizes for achieving a specified amount of exercise in a limited amount of time.

The result of this consultation was a discovery document over a 150 pages in length.

From there we were tasked in designing the interface for the majority of the SportBrain.com web application and then handing them off to a 3rd party technology group to be implemented.

Discovery Document
Website construction, like any form of production, needs a process. As the internet is still in its relative infancy, there is no "traditional" process to speak of. As such, I have been involved in the ongoing search to define a system for website design.

Dresden cheap hotelsOne such step is the refinement a tool called a discovery document. We create such a document before actual production occurs. During the discovery process we meet with the clients and research as in-depth as possible what it is we are trying to achieve in the project.

The end result in the discovery document is to serve three purposes:

1. To record what was discussed with the client.
2. To layout what our recomendations are to best meet the client's goals.
3. To document, using timelines and milestone lists, how to achieve such recommendations .

The most complex discovery document I have been involved with is the document we created for SportBrain. It was over 150 pages long. It documented meetings, detailed our marketing/ technical/creative recommendations, and laid out our plan on how to achieve those ideas.

I've posted two sections of that discovery document here.

Discovery Document: Notes
In order to allow future readers to understand just how we arrived at our recommendations, we included the notes taken during our client meetings..

To see the notes click here.

Discovery Document: Milestone Schedule
Its one thing to give out ideas. Its another to make it happen. Here is an example of the scheduling detail required to make sure the client, ourselves and a third party technical group named Architeer, all worked as efficiently as possible towards a common goal.

To see the milestone schedule click here