Slideshare have a right-hand column area for presentations where they show statistics on a specific presentation and background information on the presentation. This information is probably of much less importance to the user when compared to the actual content of the presentation but I’ve always found it pretty interesting information. It’s like when iTunes tell you that you have 280 songs in your library, which is 1.7GB’s worth of music, and 20.1 hours of music. Seriously, who’s going to care how long playing ALL your music in your library, back-to-back, will take? Not many people, but it’s one of those ‘oh that’s interesting’ nuggets of information that just adds value to the page and, I think, adds a bit more kudos to your site. It’s like having a friend who knows a bit about everything, in that alot of what they say isn’t of immediate importance but it’s interesting / amusing / entertaining / educational.

I often push for this kind of information, where available and relevant. Sometimes it’s information that users wouldn’t need (which makes it an ‘interesting’ bit of info) or it may be something that the user does want to know (in which case you’ve already worked it out for them).

It’s been a while since my last post. My blog’s looking a bit abandoned indeed. Well I’m back to give it a bit of attention. I’m coming to the end of a 10-month project re-vamping the sales and care sites for a major UK brand who offers phone, tv, broadband and mobile products. It’s also been my very first taste of agile. It’s definitely been a learning process and the 10 months have flown by.

I’ve worked with some amazing people and I’m proud to see some of the work that’s been delivered.

I’m going to use this blog post to reflect on the project for learning for future projects.

Office location. We’ve been working on client site for the past 6 months in Hammersmith. It’s not the usual agency studio-type envirnoment. The lack of a creative ‘buzz’ and exposure to other projects probably affected us. Just being able to get a view of what other people were up to not only serves to inspire but it also adds interest to the work day. Our facilities weren’t so good too. Never underestimate the importance of free coffee and tea making facilities. Free toast – even better. It’s the little things. After a few weeks that did get sorted but you notice the absence of home comforts, which just accentuate the slight feeling of isolation when placed – compared to London Bridge – in the middle of nowhere. Credit to management for popping in and bringing treats. Now we’re almost gone, the facilities are getting even better. We’ve got vending machines, coffee machines and an HD widescreen tv (great for the world cup that’s just started). Initial teething problems with getting online and printing proved frustrating – don’t ever take these for granted! I remember going entire days without web access … not much use when you’re trying to design a website. The lack of wall space also hampered our delivery. I’ve never seen this as an issue before but now, looking back, working on such a huge programme with multiple workstreams, multiple sites, multiple parts of the business, I would have really benefitted from a kind of entire-wall-sitemap. Somewhere I or anyone could go and get an instant visual representation of the site, or more importantly, what was done and what wasn’t. And then we should have stuck our wireframes and designs all over this wall so we could piece together different journeys and ensured acm consistently brilliant experience …

Agile. The thing with Agile is you have to do it properly for it to truly work. Our process was Agile up to a certain point – handing over to Tech. Initially this confusion led to alot of back-and-forth with technology about our documentation. Initially we thought light agile documentation would suffice. It didn’t and I soon recognised that what we needed to hand over, UX documentation-wise, needed to be much more detailed to be accepted. I guess some visibility at the start of the entire process would have helped. In the same way that a high-level sitemap at the beginning would have helped me not only plan the work, but it would have also helped me to see where each piece fitted in the site. I remember feeling slightly uncomfortable at the beginning about designing pages of a site but not knowing anything about the main navigation … but hey, ‘this is agile’. Good things about agile is how closely UX, design and dev – as well as BA and QA – worked together. I found this bit really enjoyable (I finally know what BAs do!). I learnt alot off these guys, not only about their work but also about their passion for what they do. Only today I told our tester that I really like her ‘bug updates’ email she sends round with this week’s ‘bug king or queen’. Brilliant and inspiring. Morning scrums were initially good. You got good visibility about who was doing what but it soon became apparent that when your team became just 2 people, it wasn’t so useful … especially if you sat next to each other. The taskboard was also a bit neglected at various points in the sprint – often only updated when reminded by PMs or when planning the next sprint. The thing with planning tasks is that when told to sit down and plan the next two weeks work you inevitably think (a) I can’t possibly capture everything I need to do right now and (b) what I do capture I can’t possibly estimate accurately. And in the end the tasks put on the board become so generic that you often don’t need to revisit the board for days. Actually, I sometimes had more detailed tasks on a tickable to-do list in my notepad – which is probably the wrong way to do Agile. On the other hand, working closely with clients is ace. And positive feedback off the back of a sprint review is always morale-boosting.

As mentioned earlier, an overview of the site (high-level sitemap) would hvae helped but an overview to the business would have been good too. Who the different stakeholders are and what their goals and priorities were would have been good. Maybe an early insight into technical platforms / limitations would have helped set expectations … no, scrap that … that would have just stifled creativity. And while we’re talking about expectations we really should have had all stakeholders agree the business requirements for every individual section – even those deemed a mere re-skin or light-touch UX. Tell you what, light-touch UX is a very difficult thing to do. As a UX working on a piece of work it’s hard not to try and make improvements.

Right. I think I’ve captured most key issues here. Baby is sound asleep and I’d be foolish not to take advantage of sleeping time!

I do like the way the WFP made their navigation more graphical and contextual, as well as adding an audience-based navigation below.

There are alot of these buttons / functionality popping up on various sites. This execution appears to be the best I’ve seen so far …

Another project I worked on at MRM London has picked up a BIMA award. It’s brilliant news. So proud of our achievement as a team and it definitely makes a good year’s work even more worthwhile. I’m going to post it here because I have a feeling it’ll be the last award-win I’ll be involved in for a while, and so I don’t forget about them [pauses to cry]. That’s not to say my current company is not good enough to win awards, but simply the nature of the sites we make here aren’t those likely to be shortlisted in many awards that I’ve seen.

It’s been a real privilege to be involved with two BIMA award winning projects in my time with MRM. I’m also going to use this post as a chance to look back at some of the work I did at MRM, my first meaty IA role. In fact I was just plain lucky that during my time there, we did some really interesting stuff. I think it’s probably the right time to talk about them now seeing as I’ll probably forget about all the work we did pretty soon.

Front of mind is the now ‘award-winning’ (woohoo!) ITM3 which was a fairly full-on Flash-based game where the poor old IT Manager would fix issues and optimise systems to grow a company and into a multinational; then we had ‘Intel Studio’ (which also won a BIMA award the year before) – a music competition site where artists could upload music, get voted on, perform gigs, and ultimately win a record deal; we also had an interactive mural where people can upload their own pictures and messages about the future to be part of a piece of online community art project; we built a site that housed an augmented reality experience; a search engine that trawled third-party sites for travel related images and content and presented the results as clouds floating over a skyline; a Facebook application; a product aggregator site; a news portal for hardcore gamers; and almost (before the projects died their respective deaths) an online community with all the community bells & whistles, and an online communication platform for pharmaceutical sales reps and GPs.

It was an amazing time, at an agency where I was allowed to learn my trade but also given a good balance of responsibility and guidance. I’ve learnt a great deal from these guys, many of whom I hope to work again with in the future … some of whom I already have.