Week 6 - Race to the Finish

Monday - 8am-5pm - 9 hours
Thursday - 8am-5pm - 9 hours

Total - 59.5 hours


Week 6 was the sprint to the finish before the start of UXI on Monday the 23rd. Having a week off gave me the chance to let my frustration cool off and develop a clearer plan in my head. Monday morning I started by creating an itemized list of all the remaining tasks and sorted them roughly by priority. I moved ahead by attempting to answer the questions I left off with last time:

• Speakers will have individual logins and will be able to post to 3 categories (announcements, logistics, and happenings) which will be automatically pulled onto the homepage
• Attendees (and therefore, general public) will be able to view all content besides the slidedecks without password protection
• Commenting will be enabled for any home page postings and will not require WP registration, hopefully creating some sense of social networking/communication
  

Deciding to axe the login/password restriction system was certainly a painful one, considering how much work went into creating a functional system in the first place. I do however think that it was a prudent one, and will result in a better overall user experience in the long run. It certainly was a tradeoff between choosing silent password protection or user commenting.

I spent the rest of Monday afternoon testing the site on PC browsers. This is something I'd normally do at home but my testing PC recently contracted a virus and proceeded to completely erase itself (thank you Microsoft), so I had to wait until I was in the office to do my testing.

Firing up the old, crusty PC reminding me of how much I don't miss working with Windows. The first screen I was greeted with was all-black with a white mono-spaced message that read: "Keyboard error... press F1 to continue." I wonder if the developer ever realized the irony of that message.

Debugging went surprisingly well. Normally I check periodically on IE6 while I build out to avoid any possible train-wrecks. This was the first time that I had completely built out a site before testing, essentially flying blind. Miraculously, I only had one bug to trace and achieved a solid layout all the way back to IE5--a small miracle.

Thursday I came in to finish up the remaining items, mostly small and repetitive details. I created all the user accounts for the AP staff and sent out an email, urging them to fill in existing content gaps. Finished constructing the category/archive page templates and enabled, styled, and tested user commenting. Spent an hour or two exchanging emails with Verba attempting to understand the ever-complicated .htaccess system, in order to password protect the slidedecks, and finally got it working.

On Friday, I took care of a few last details at home, making sure that the site was ready to go live.

It's go time...

Week 5

Out of town - more to come next week

Week 4

Monday - 8am-5pm - 9 hours
Thurs - 8am-4pm - 8 hours

Total - 41.5 hours

I came in to AP twice this week due to the fact that I will be out of town next week. I have the pleasure of traveling with a group of around 50 people to Tijuana, Mexico to collectively build three houses for those who have none in a community-building service project. I came in on Thursday to compensate the lost hours.

Monday was a quiet day. Henning was in Germany visiting family and Brandon was preparing for/giving a virtual seminar online. The vast majority of the day was heads-down work, learning how to accomplish things in Wordpress. I certainly vacillate between equally appreciating Wordpress for it's high level of customization and extendability and loathing it for not thinking like I do.

Thursday I jumped back into the nitty-gritty of building out the site. I spent the morning rifling through the Wordpress codex learning how to use various tags for the custom content-pulling templates.

By lunch, I decided it was time for a little pow-wow with Henning and Brandon. My primary frustration was that so far into the project, I still felt like I (we) didn't fully understand what the speakers and attendees want/need to do with the site, essentially missing the entire point at a place in the timeline where the project should be wrapping up. Another frustration was the fact that due to the technology limits we basically had to choose login/content restriction at the expense of commenting or any sort of individual accounts/communication.

We didn't come up with any profound conclusions/solutions but it was good for me to talk out-loud and attempt to articulate my ideas, mostly for my sake. I concluded by saying that the remaining questions to answer were: What exactly will the speakers want to post and where? and, How do the conference attendees want to communicate/interact with the site/community?

That essentially ended the workday. I was feeling the afternoon slump and took off a little early.

Week 5

Out of town - more to come next week

Week 3 - Blood clots, Super Burritos, and More Wordpress!

8am-5pm - 9 hours
Total - 24.5 hours

I rolled into AP around 9:30 as usual and was pleased to find a reserved parking spot (thank you Henning) which saved me a cool $12. Checked in and found out that Brandon was hospitalized due to leg pain (update: Brandon had a blood clot in his leg and is on the road to recovery, though the doctors couldn't find a definite cause for the clot. He should be back within a week or so.)

Sebastian and I got back to work configuring our Wordpress installations and finding what is and isn't possible with the restriction plugins. Up until this point, we had been testing everything on Sebastian's and my servers. About half-way through the morning, we connected with David Verba who set up a subdomain of the AP site where we will actual be hosting the site. This was a good step seeing as now we don't have to worry about different versions of Wordpress or having to migrate from another server configuration.

At noon we breaked and sat in on another portfolio presentation for the visual design lead. The woman interviewing, Kumi (forget her last name), is coming from over 10 years as a visual designer for Microsoft, involved heavily in the creation of Windows Vista, Windows Live, MSNTV, etc. I found myself more inpressed than the portfolio of the previous week, yet still not "wowed." I thought she had some excellent insight into where the existing Microsoft process is broken but still have to wonder just how many bad habits become engrained after working in a dysfunctional system for that long. Also, her portfolio was about 90% Microsoft work and didn't give much of a sense of versatility. It seems like someone that's going to fufill all the requirements of AP is going to have to be flat out amazing. Let's just say I'm glad that I'm just the intern.

After the presentation Sebastian and I headed over to Mexico du Parc (as usual) and grabbed some food to take back to the office (carne asada super burrito = muy bien). We continued to play around with the plugins and I read up on some of the Wordpress documentation, trying to understand "Pages." Sebastian headed off to a meeting and I continued working solo.

At some point during the afternoon, I noticed that I lost the ability to use the theme editor with an odd error message saying "if this file were writable, you could edit it." Frusturated, I spent way too long tracing the problem to incorrect permissions on some of the FTPed folders. After finally resolving that, I spent the rest of the afternoon fighting the FTP connection that refused to transfer more than one file at a time without timing out--a frusturating end to an unproductive afternoon.

Next week I'll be coming in two days to compensate for being out of town over spring break. We need to get cracking with less than two weeks to go. More to come...

Week 2 - Scheduling, Wordpress

8am-6pm - 10 hours

Over the course of the week, several emails were exchanged as the rest of the team moved ahead on the project. Brandon sketched out some wireframes and Henning conducted some preliminary research on available Wordpress plugins and extensions.

One thing that we've definitely decided is to drop the social networking aspect of the site. With such a short timeframe, it is far beyond our scope to create things like customizable profiles and any sort of social networking tools. This is mildly disappointing considering that this would have probably been the most "fun" part of the project, had we had the time. Our thesis is still relevant but has shifted from, "how can we make an effective social hub for attendees by leveraging already-available tools and best practices?" to, "what makes an effective event info site given specific audiences and a limited site lifespan?"

Brandon, Henning, Sebastian and I got together and discussed the emails of the previous weeks as well as ways to move ahead. At this point, the schedule we've roughly worked out looks something like this:

• March 19 - IA and plan for controlled access and posting (AM) Set up Wordpress, get to know/explore functionality (PM)
• March 22 - Open design session with UXI presenters to review IA, visual design, address concerns
• March 26 - IA revision/finalization, application of design/site configuration
• April 2 - Plug-in (non-essential) installation/configuration
• April 9 - Content population
• April 16 - Site testing/debugging
• April 18 - Site launch/begin attendee email blast
• April 23 - UXI week (tech support @ AP by Sebastian and John)

The topic of the day was controlled access. Since not all attendees register for all days of the event and the general public has access to the site, it's important to not devalue the workshops by giving away information that only belongs in the hands (on the eyes?) of registered attendees. Therefore, the basic information flow will go something like this:

1. Visitor arrives at home page of site
2. Individual event day summaries and speaker bios are available to unregistered user
   
3. User must login to view the rest of the materials corresponding to their registered days

Since the way in which the content is restricted is so important, we decided to let the findings of our research dictate the final IA and not the other way around. Sebastian and I got to work researching different options while Brandon and Henning headed off to meetings for the rest of the day.

Sebastian Heycke is a twentysomething student from Germany, currently progressing through an internship at Adaptive Path as part of his studies in a program akin to a master's. He's a extremely nice and talented guy as well as an excellent and articulate English speaker, despite a thick German accent. He and I will be handling the bulk of the dirty work during this project.

We started by following the links to wordpress plugins that Henning sent out in an email earlier in the week. We quickly narrowed our list down by eliminating the ones that were missing features crucial to our project and continued to research and compare the remaining few.

We spent most of the morning configuring and testing a plugin called PageAccess that appeared to offer all the features we were looking for. Unfortunately, right before lunch, we discovered that the plugin was not functioning in the way that it claimed to and restricted page permissions in the back-end rather than the front-end, making it entirely unsuitable for our needs. Half a day down the drain!

We took a break at noon and sat in on a portfolio presentation for a visual design interviewee. To be honest, I was a little underwhelmed. I was really hoping to be wowed, but most of the designs were uninspiring and a few were downright ugly. She didn't seem to have the vibe that Adaptive Path would be looking for as well.

Sebastian and I headed over for some super tacos at Mexico du Parc and then returned to our lair and the warm glow of LCD screens. Feeling the afternoon slump, we struggled to find another solution to our now-vexing problem.

By the end of the day we fortunately found a plugin combination that will hopefully accomplish our goals. One plugin effectively restricts access based on user role, identity, and capability and the other allows users to log into the back-end via the front-end and without having to visit the control panel. While there are still some limitations to overcome (hidden content doesn't show up at all, redirecting appears to be fairly inflexible, etc.) we at least made some solid progress and met our goals for the day. More to come...

Week 1 - Good to Be Back

9:00-2:30 - 5.5 hours

Today was my first day back at Adaptive Path and it's good to be back. I showed up around 10:00 and Brandon was on the phone with his insurance company due to a woman abruptly opening her door and taking of his mirror on the way to work.

So Henning and I got together and talked about Adaptive Path's upcoming event, User Experience Intensive week (UXI). Part of what AP does is hosting seminars and events across the country in order to share lessons of their expansive work experience. The upcoming UXI week is a 4-day event in Chicago with a different emphasis each day.

During the last user experience seminar that AP hosted, an attempt was made to create a centralized online hub for the attendees. The idea was that people could come and collaborate on ideas, share thoughts about the event, and generally socialize. Unfortunately, the site failed to meet most, if not all, of these goals.

This time around, we are looking to create a centralized online home for UXI week and successfully meet the needs of our targeted audiences. I poked around researching a few different tools: socialtext, wordpress, etc. for the rest of the morning.

At lunch we went over to Mexico au Parc and grabbed some lunch to take back to one of the conference rooms. A few more people joined us and we began to hash out the details of what the site audiences, goals, and requirements will be. Initially we've identified the following as goals:

• Connect attendees with each other
• Enable communication between attendees and speakers
• Create a centralized, recyclable (easily adapted for future events) resource for logistical information
• Provide a reference source for attendees before, during, and after the workshops

The formats we've brainstormed are: a wiki, a wordpress site, a social networking site like Ning, or something else or some combination of the above.

One idea that definitely resonated was Jesse's comment that we need to be "ruthless" with scope on this project. The conference runs from April 23-26, so we are on an extremely tight schedule, giving me only 5 work days between now and launch.