Keep the previous structure, and I will review with 3 aspects
- Design projects
- Internal initiatives
- Reading & writing
Design projects
- Finished a corporate website redesign, with new information architecture, new branding, new CMS. It took 7 design sprints, from May to Sep.
I learned a lot of lessons. Topics like content audit, site search, accessibility are on my to-do list to document down. For other topics like digital governance, digital branding, headless CMS, I still struggled with and need to learn further about them.
2. Another project is working with a new startup in energy industry. They want to build a future energy ecosystem simulator so users understand what actions we should take right now to tackle the energy challenges.
The corporate website project mentioned above needs to involve so many stakeholders to contribute, review and decide. With startup, the team is much leaner. We worked with the same group of key stakeholders in the entire process. They are dedicated. They share information with each other easily and make decisions fast.
I was mainly planning and moderating the concept phase. During the 2-week concept phase, we adapted the design process based on the Google Design Sprint framework.
W1 D1: Kick off
- List out the team and stakeholders
- Share Product & Project goals, success metrics, risks, and expectation
- Clarify what’s in scope, what’s out of scope
- Deep dive in the business context
- Align on timeline, collaboration details like rituals and tools
W1 D3: Deep dive on users and user journey
- Expert interview
- Actor map: map out the user types and decide on the main persona
- Solution map: map out the user journey by discover-learn-use-goal, and define the key moments
W2 D1: Ideate
- Recap last week’s result: product vision, main persona, user journey
- Lightening presentation: 5' for each participant, learn from the inspirations we collected
- Sketch: we took the 4-step sketch process (see below)
- Present and vote
W2 D3: Converge
- Present the latest concept that incorporates all the ideas
- Decide together on directions
W3 D1: Start interface phase
- Present the overall concept: Problem statement, product vision, solution concept and sketches
- Deep dive for each part to prepare for interface exploration
- Interface phase planning: how to in parallel start the branding work stream, how to prepare for the user test.
Internal initiatives
Because of the workload in client projects, I didn't move further with initiatives like:
- project portfolio
- new offer template
- post-project process
- retrospective templates
I see other team members pick some of them up, extend the scope, refine the templates, or add new ideas. But in general, the challenge to work on internal workflow optimization or knowledge sharing is to have a big picture (able to connect several initiatives together), establish a more stable and dedicated working group (really put names behind the work)and define goals/ achievable scope to produce tangible outcome.
Reading & Writing
- Jun: The elements of content strategy
- Jul: Web Content Management
- Aug: On writing well
- Sep: Surrounded by idiots, Visual collaboration
