Thoughts on Full Code Press 2009
Last week I took part in Full Code Press, in which the team I was part of had to design and built a website for a not-for-profit client in the space of just 24 hours, competing against a similar team from New Zealand.
It was an intriguing prospect that didn’t fail to deliver some eventful moments, as well as a lot of frenzied activity. We didn’t win but that doesn’t matter I don’t think any of us were doing it for that reason.
So what did I learn from the event? Well it’s pretty obvious but I learnt it’s hard to cover that much ground in so little time. No so much because of the amount of work, but because of the group dynamics. The team had never met before, let alone worked together before, and we all had different style and ways of working. Making the absolute most of every minute of our time was difficult.
Our client was the NSW Disability Discrimination Legal Centre (DDLC) who promote and protect the human and legal rights of people with disability and their supporters through legal advocacy.
My role in the team was that of user advocate, and not surprisingly it was difficult to practice user centred design under those conditions. I had some grand plans for user involvement including making use of the many people passing by (the competition was held inside of the CeBIT technology exhibition) but there simply wasn’t time. We could have used card sorting to get some idea of how to structure the content so it would make more sense to users, we could have tested early prototypes, we could have tested the finished design to find usability issues, but there just wasn’t time.
Add to this the fact that the CeBIT crowd did not provide a good match with our primary audience (clients and potential clients of the DDLC) nor even our secondary audience (volunteers and donators–other than Bill Gates I don’t think IT folk are big philanthropists). True, they would have been better than nothing, but there just wasn’t time.
I had to take a heuristic approach. I think the name of the role I was given was entirely apt, I was the advocate, I had to stand in for the users (or who we thought our users were). Normally I would do this based on quite a bit of research.
Our client was vastly different that of the New Zealand team, being a legal organisation working to support people with disability who have been discriminated against. It’s a more serious organisation (not to dismiss the plight of the young people that RainbowYouth help out) and thus required a certain approach in terms or branding, visual design, tone of voice and functionality. For example,
social media is not that relevant to our client’s audience, but even it it was, creating and cultivating social media networks is beyond the resources and capabilities of our client at this time.
They also had a lot of content, and had done a great deal of preparation in terms of auditing their content and thinking about how to re-structure it all. (In hindsight I spent a lot of time managing content, putting it into the CMS and converting from other formats.)
Our first step was to talk to the client and get the dialogue happening. Our main contact, Peter, is deaf so these initial conversations were done with the aid of a sign-language interpreter (who was working hard!). It didn’t matter so much what we talked about at that point, it was more about getting a feel for each other and working out where to go next. Where we did go was into a discussion about brand and what they wanted the website to say and be.
I then did a quick analysis of the audience groups the client had spoken about. It broke down as follows: clients (those seeking assistance from the DDLC), givers (volunteers, donators and people wishing to help out in other ways) and info seekers (government departs, lawyers and anyone looking for reference material regarding disability discrimination). See the audience model sketch in the photo above.
Meanwhile the rest of the team got on with their own tasks; development got the technical stuff setup, content did an audit, design started on brand essence, and our project manager helped us all.
Rhonda (content) and I then took apart the content and reassembled it in a user centric model. This formed our draft IA, in post-it note form. At this point it was almost lockdown. If we had attempted card sorting it would have run out of time. Preparing the cards would probably have taken as long as doing our draft IA, and then we’d have to grab some people and run some sessions. Or we could have at least tested our proposed IA, but again, time just wasn’t available.
I did some revisions to the IA but we had to bed it down pretty quickly so that everyone else could work with the structure. Version 2 of the sitemap is shown above.
Next I worked on some user paths (process flows) for the donation, newsletter and membership functionality. This could have been stronger, but I think it was good enough to get by.
I then worked with design to whip up some basic wireframes, firstly for the home page and then lower level pages. Not a lot of fidelity was necessary as Alexi (design) had a pretty handle on it. During this we also refined the IA and brought it more online with our emerging audience model. This allowed to focus on the three main purposes of the site and lead to an elegant structure and home page that was commented on by several judges. The labelling came together during this whiteboard session too.
From here I started on putting finished content into the system, while dev and design finished building the site around it. The wee hours of Wednesday morning are a bit of a blur, they passed by quite quickly and we covered a lot of the monotonous ground during this time.
Barring a few technology hitches right at the very end, we brought the site together and met our minimum requirements just in time. The finished site can be found at: www.fcp-aussie.com.
All in all it was an fascinating experience. Congratulations to the Kiwi team for winning, but I must also congratulate the Australian team (from left to right in the photo below): Alexi Paschalidis (design), Elle Meredith (front end), me, James Farrell (back end), Rhonda Prentice (content) and Wendy White (project manager). I’d also like to thank our clients Natalie and Peter (and Sean his interpreter).
You can find more photos on Flickr and video on YouTube.
Tips for future FCP teams
- Meet up beforehand, to get to know each other a bit. The NZ team has a distinct advantage in that they travel over together and spend quite a bit of time together leading to the event.
- Plan your approach. Talk about who does what and when. You need to create a process that might normally evolve over years of working together. But you must accept it’s a compromised situation and that you won’t be able to do everything perfectly.
- Brainstorm anticipated functionality. It’s not hard to think of things most not fir profit organisations would want on the website. You might discount much of it based on knowledge of the audience (once the 24 hours starts) but at least you’ll be ready if it is needed.
- Choose technology that your techies are familiar with. Actually, more than familiar. They should know it well so that if problems crop up they can address them quickly.
- Be prepared for a lot of content. If your client has a lot to go into their new website, you need to have a strategy for handling that (perhaps strip it down or put some into PDF). The amount of content we had to deal with almost sunk us on the day.
- Focus on the website. You’re not being tasked with overhauling the clients business processes, just building a website. Sure, if you have time you might work on some way of tying the website into their CRM system, for example, but it’s likely you won’t have that much time!
- Alert the organisers as soon as there are any issues. This includes anything to do with the work environment, printers, servers, wifi, food etc.
Suggestions for FCP organisers
Firstly, great work guys, thanks for organising everything. Here are my suggestions:
- Maybe it would be better to pitch the two teams head to head for the one client. This would make for fairer judging by eliminating the possibility of having two vastly different clients.
- Maybe we now go world-wide: an ANZAC team takes on the Northern hemisphere?
- I’m not sure what benefits there were in being inside CeBIT, the exposure wasn’t great and nobody really knew what we were doing, and the lockdown also caused our clients some hassle. (oh and there was a cockroach in the toaster)
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