Concept Design Feedback, seems all good...

It's been a week and a half since I took delivery of the new concept designs for the website and there's been a flurry of activity around collecting feedback! Last week was a round of showcases for board members as well as a week of collecting comments from students at our De Havilland campus.

The good news is that we are running at 92% positive feedback on the new designs overall and when we filter out the staff feedback we are at 94% positive for our students. Not a bad number and we still have a week of feedback to collect as well...

Having a mixture of Yes/No questions with narrative follow ups has allowed us to pick up on recurrent themes within the comments and is highlighting what we should be addressing in order to get as close to 100% positive as possible. No shockers so far which is good and hopefully I can roll out a very small preview closer to us going live!

Interestingly, within the questions we started to tease out some feedback on mobile usage, currently we only have 49% of our students/staff accessing the University website on their mobile phone, mainly due to the awkwardness of navigation. However, when asked if they would use the site if it were responsive the number went up to 63%... highlights that mobile usage is more front of mind than some people may think!

Concept designs have arrived!

One of the most asked questions when running through a digital project is "What will it look like?" which is usually followed by a statement such as "I know a few things about design, i'd be happy to help you..."

The presentation of new designs can be an exciting time in the project but requires close management on what happens with the feedback given. All comments are valid but there needs to be an assessment of the impact suggestions can have and how they might impact on the overall business requirements. I have just taken delivery of the new concepts designs for the website from Squiz's Head of Design Matt and they look amazing! Although I have my preference over which design I prefer I now need to keep a neutral hat on whilst showcasing the designs to all stakeholders.

So for the next two weeks I will be collecting feedback, collating suggestions and starting to draw out the comments that keep cropping up. This should give me a good understanding of any potential issues and then how to rectify them. Ultimately there will need to be a decision on what not to action...

So, a significant step in the project that all stakeholders can participate in, is that a good or a bad thing!

Design concepts... done!

After a furiously busy week last week we finally have an agreed design concept and functional specification.

The original design concept that came across was really good but as you can probably guess, everyone has an opinion on what the website should look like and so we needed to make some tweaks! In order to take the designs forward Squiz passed us the PSD files (try that with another agency!) and I sent them out to our internal designers for tweaking.

The only real area that needed looking at was the banner slot and how the banners will be displayed.The following day I had 5 alternative designs sent back to me and using a combination of two (thanks Mick & David) I presented the final design concept to our Steering Group members and it was happily signed off.

A great example of some flexible working and collaboration!

The functional specification document was a different beast as that one was down to me and a lot of reading time! Luckily the workshops we held at the beginning of the project helped to focus on what we wanted delivered and apart from having to read and re-read a 110 page document it required little changing. The advantages to doing some planning in the early stages certainly paid off and the final functional specification was signed off on Friday as well.

Tweaked, signed and done... phew! Now it's time to move on to the additional designs, project plan, build... migration.... testing.....

The design concept is here...

So, wireframes are done and we've moved onto the far more controversial design concepts! I picked them up on Friday from Squiz and overall we're really pleased, we made a couple of initial tweaks here and there to pull some 'real world' content onto the page to make the presentations to the working and steering groups a little easier.

The tricky part now is going to be giving everyone the opportunity to feedback on the look and feel, collate those responses into something usable and then refine the designs! We're looking at holding focus groups with our current students and also to open up an online feedback session for all staff to contribute. I'm expecting a lot of replies to be based around content rather than design but that's only normal!

I would obviously love to put a copy of the designs up on the blog but then that would ruin the surprise!

Analysis phase... done!

So, we are now five weeks into our project and we are at the end of our Analysis Phase and all of our workshops are done... Phew!

Having had 9 workshops scheduled we managed to wizz our way through and complete them all in only 8 sessions, super efficient! The outcome of all of these workshops is that we now have some detailed wireframes for the website layout and they're looking really good. Even without a design on them the wireframes show that we will have a very visual change to the websites key landing pages and a huge shift towards a site that is focused on our key audience, the prospective student!

So now we have some quiet time where I need to get sign off from the steering group and Squiz need to start work on the design concepts for the website. Then, we start moving into the implementation phase, the data migration and integration stages should prove very interesting. We have a lot of complicated systems at the University and some of the key ones will need to be able to push data to the websites. Luckily initial findings are looking very promising however, I always stay a little concerned until it's all in place and working!

1 month into a 6 month project and not only are we on budget, on time and on scope but we're also all still talking to each other, a very positive sign!