phil herborn

I was kicking back in the sun yesterday thinking… what are the high level web design considerations that I would lead clients through this year? These were the most prominent in my mind (perhaps you can help me out? what have I missed?).

1. How to make it Social: 2008 will be the year where we work out how to use social media better, we’ll be experimenting still with how it works (and here and here) and what it is (and here and check this map). So any project team is going to be asking itself… Is it relevant to use social media for this project? What forms of social media are we confident will work for this project? and What forms are worth experimenting with?

2. Make it simple and easy to use: Rather than bloating a website with as many features as the budget can possibly stand project teams should be pushing back on clients who want more features for the buck by selling the virtues of something that is simple and easy to use. It’s the less is more thing… throw out the 80% of features that are just clutter and spend the budget on the 20% that is going to make a difference and that make it 10x better for the end customer.

3. Can I justify a mobile site: The big companies are into it, medium and small size companies will dabble more. Project teams will ask is there some piece of content that would be great to access from anywhere? Perhaps posting a wine review from the dinner table or checking my new car order status from the bus stop. Web development teams will start testing their websites on mobile phone browsers, initially out of curiosity, then out of necessity as clients start to demand that their sites work on mobile too.

What do think? What have I missed?

I’ve been playing around with this idea of the Project Management Square, the triple constraints of project management: time, budget and scope could really do with an extra constraint ” we enjoyed it”. Cause at the end of the day if we aren’t all having fun, was it really a quality project??? whatdoyareckon?

I’ve been chatting to a few people at agencies around Sydney and there seems to be a theme emerging where Online Producers are no longer expected to be Project Managers as well as User Experience/ Information Architecture folk. I think this is awesome and reflects the fact that roles within our industry are evolving nicely and some things that we thought used to work well enough together are having to change as specialisms within a web team develop.

So a producer may have been typically responsible for consulting, dreaming up ideas, planning, information architecture, project management, account management, content creation, team management and more! There are a lot of tasks there and some compete for head space with each other in a big way e.g. Day to Day Project Management Vs Dreaming up ideas.

Going forward I think the roles are going to be more like: thinkers, planners, executers and completer finishers all working in collaboration on awesome web projects. The actual title might change, the number of people performing each component may vary and there will be overlaps still, but the days of a Producer trying to do everything that Visual Designers and Programmers don’t do are numbered.

Scenario: You’re working on a project and you come across a problem. You realise that you need to talk to your client about this problem because it will affect quality of the project. You don’t want to have the conversation because it is going to be tough. So you sit on it, hope that it goes away or leave it for when you are in a better mood or something like that.

DON’T

Cause the longer you leave it the worse it is going to get (heard that one before?)

That tough conversation is only going to turn into a nightmare conversation.

So here are some reasons why it is better to have the tough conversation upfront.

1. to avoid the nightmare conversation

2. to build trust with your clients, they may not want to hear the bad news but they will appreciate and learn to respect you more if you keep them in the loop.

3. to solve the problem sooner rather than later, the sooner it is out in the open and the more people are talking about it the sooner someone or you will come up with a solution.

I was thinking the other day about what it takes to make a really really good website, all it takes is a good team who works well together, a good team will sort out the rest of the puzzle.

So the ideal website that works for the user and the site owner takes hard work from a variety of different disciplines. Bringing the pieces together takes talent, good communication, and an understanding that all the pieces of the puzzle need to work together in order to make an excellent website. Different specialists bringing the pieces together is collaboration, the best collaborations produce the best web work*.

Garrett identified the nine pillars of the successful web team, which is a well respected view of the skills that you need in a web team, but if you have all of these pillars and they can’t collaborate/ work together/ inspire each other and so on then you’ll get average rather than awesome results. I’m going to bang on more about this topic for sure!

*not based on any actual scientific stylee research, just an observations of web projects in the last 8 years or so.

Here’s a quick list of what’s involved in what may seem like a simple 5 minute task such as changing a banner graphic on a webpage. Keep these in mind when you find yourself having to justify a quote to a client and you’ll both be happier.

(Actual steps will vary depending on how comprehensive a procedure you follow)

1. the job starts with taking the brief from the client

2. produce an estimate and feed it back to the client for sign off

3. {a copy and paste booboo, see comments below}

4. brief the team who’ll do the work

5. “the actual work of getting the task done” (this is often the only bit that gets quoted for/ estimated)

6. check that the task has been done correctly (internal testing)

7. check with the client that the task has been done correctly on a staging/test server (acceptance testing) and get sign off OR fix any bugs (if so repeat the last steps again)

8. upload to the live server

9. update version control software

10. test on live

11. test with client and get signoff

12. close job internally (eg mark job as closed in your task tracking software and send job description over to the accounts department)

13. raise invoice

14. chase payment up

15. phew your done!

Try doing that in 5 minutes!

Is 5 minutes the most misunderstood unit of time in the world?

When I thought that I could write my first blog post in less than 5 minutes I joined (again) the masses of people who think that you can cram ‘that task’ into the black hole of time units “5 minutes”. And is it irony that what I wanted to write about was that very same unit of time?

If you want to do something and you don’t have the time for it, you tell yourself you can do it in 5 minutes…. and it ends up taking 2 hours.

If your car breaks down and you take it to the mechanic, you tell yourself that the mechanic can fix it in 5 minutes … it ends up taking 2 weeks and costing $1950.

If you are having a good time, 5 minutes feels like seconds, doing something you hate… 5 minutes is an eternity.

So if your involved in estimating work either for a client or as part of a production team or for managing the tasks in your own day, I reckon understanding what can be done in 5 minutes is the “learning to walk the rice paper” of the working world.

Understand what can be squeezed into 5 minutes and you’re on your way to planning nirvana.

So here’s a game to try out that will give yourself a better understanding of “5 minutes”

• Pick 3 tasks that you have to do today that you think will take 5 minutes
• Do the tasks and time how long they actually took
• You have 30 points to start with
• for each task that took longer than 5 minutes subtract 2 points per minute from your original 30 points.
• For each task that took less than 5 minutes subtract 1 point
• if you still have 30 points – you are the kung fu master of time, 20-30 nice one! 0-20 not too bad huh! Into the minuses… hey practice estimating more, it can’t hurt!

Feel free to post your scores as comments on this post.