Online Business Engineering (OBE) is a design and development methodology. The OBE method gives teams & individuals a modular roadmap towards successful, manageable and fully responsive online businesses, brands, products & services.
The OBE approach empowers design and development teams (as well as solo freelancers), by giving them a process that ensures the consistency of your business identity, everywhere your customers interact with you online.
The identity of your online business is composed of the human-observable sum of your business model parts from an “outsider” point of view. Your business identity is composed of three parts:
Branding
Narrative
Content
The product(s) for your online business can be services, software, information resources, or any combination of possibilities. In OBE, your online product(s) are also composed of three parts:
The User Experience
Front End Code
Back End Code
The marketing for your online business is focused on achieving a positive and profitable identity “imprint” in the minds of your customers. In OBE, online marketing is composed of three parts:
Social Networking
SEO (Search Enginge Optimization)
Advertising
The digital operations of your business are concerned with the the costs of both labor and capital while doing business. Your digital operations define three more aspects of your online business:
Data Flow
Work Flow
Tooling
Building responsive products for customers has become the status quo for online businesses today.
With the OBE method, responsive is not just a buzz word that precedes “Design” or “Websites.”
Instead OBE puts “responsive” at the center of how you and your teams work.
With the OBE method, “responsive” becomes a holistic thread connecting each aspect of your business together.
When you have virtually endless possibilities, staying ahead seems futile. That's why quality processes are everything these days. Under OBE, making simple changes in why/when you tackle web tasks, can dramatically decrease the investment risks of implementing them.
The slideshow above is a typical “waterfall” work flow situation found in companies across all sectors. Everyone is smart, talented and trying their best, however it's clear that the medium (a pleathora of browsers and devices) is an after-thought for most of the employees in the work flow chain.
This slideshow demonstrates the different types of conversations that OBE fosters earlier in the work flow process. This time the medium, and all of those browsers and devices, are considered before any other work is tackled.
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In most ways, OBE sticks to the proven methods and best practices that get results concerning online business. However, the priorities of the OBE method ensure you build a consistent web identity that is 100% device agnostic.
In a marketplace, branding is used to establish a unique and profitable presence to attract and retain engaged customers.
Your narrative encapsulates the reasons you are in business, and how you do business with both existing and future customers.
Your content is designed to embody the aspects of of your entire identity into a cohesive and approachable whole.
Products are key in OBE. Responsive websites are intrinsic to their medium... A.K.A. web browsers. To achieve device agnostic products that work everywhere without using browsers is impossible. Therefore our product ideas/cycles always start and finish in the browser.
User experience design is the process of ensuring user satisfaction in a product by testing and measuring the usability, accessibility, and pleasure derived from interactions and/or consumption the product.
Front end web development is the practice of producing HTML, CSS and JavaScript (which together form both the User Interface(s) and the content displayed) for a website or web application, so a user can see and interact with the application directly.
Back end web development deals with the functionality, data and business logic of a website or web application. The Back End handles, stores and manipulates data itself, while also serving the front end files as well as any dynamic interaction data to a client-side user.
Traditional marketing and advertising rocks, but they often exceed the cost of web alternatives. OBE leverages Social and SEO conscious workflows throughout marketing and advertising processes, to give you cheaper and often free marketing options. This is accomplished through skillful media planning and by leveraging gamification opportunities!
In OBE, Social refers to establishing automated and optimized content flows from your web site/app to social networks, and vise versa. Social is the dominant ongoing workload outside of updates & launches.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) involves the strategy and implementation of contextual techniques to provide a business more visibility and higher rankings on SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages.)
Advertising in OBE, refers to the outreaching communications and aspects of products that are meant to increase brand faith, brand loyalty, product awareness, and product conversions using all available analog & digital techniques.
At it's core, OBE simply re-arranges the order of attack to get any given responsive website task done. Then we implement any changes according to feedback from both internal & external user tests. This simple change gives you a truly user-centric product cycles, while alleviating backwards approval processes.
Work flow is incredibly important when working with websites. OBE puts quite a bit of focus on the most optimal work flows possible, while still keeping all team members user-centric focused.
Ensuring you collect useful data from your customers takes planning and experience. OBE considers accessible yet secure data storage (and the accessibility of that data) to be the glue that keeps the whole machine together.
At the heart of OBE, are the humble tools used to make that daily magic happen. Sometimes custom, sometimes bespoke, sometimes open source, and sometimes premium solutions enable quality output while staying efficient and sane.
