Project Management for Website Redesigns

A CIL2007’s Web Manager’s Academy, Frank Cervone, from Northwestern, did a great presentation on “Managing web redesign projects in libraries and information agencies”.

In the presentation, he reminded us why website redevelopment is so a hard nut to crack – namely, that it involves a complex series of inter-related activities and requires many different skill sets.

Then he defined project management components for us. He defined a project as something with a definite beginning and end. He defined the project manager’s responsibilities as:

• having knowledge (about the organization & skills to complete the project)
• communicating (up, down, and across the organization); this is key, Frank noted, so the project manager must put mechanisms in place to ensure this communication
• documentation
• quality control
• development (staff and working practices)

The “formal” project life cycle is:

• define (initiation)
• plan
• coordinate (Scheduling; leading, team building, motivating)
• control (accounting, record-keeping)
• close (very important – must have post-project evaluation)

Frank also mentioned “extreme project management” but did not go into it much. It sounded like it was project mgt light, so to speak, much like the rapid application development processes now used by software developers. This is a topic worthy of more research since I’d like to fast-track the planning & clearly it could be drawn out too long (to the point where the changes will no longer be meaningful as new technologies will be available).

He also talked about the allocation of resources (e.g., both cost & human resources). He said that the majority of the resource usage occurs at the end of the project, so don’t expend them all at the outset.

A project is divided into phases. Each phase has a specific function with specific deliverables and in which there is a phase exit/kill point.

Project planning should yield a project brief, describing what we envision by the time the project is done; a preliminary budget, schedule & recommendations. There must also be a project specifications document.

Scheduling and control includes: gathering and delivery plan for web content, and a plan for how to maintain the content. Decisions will need to be made about storyboards – who is involved in their creation. Project milestones will need to be set.

In constructing a website, we must also be certain to decide who gets to decide about web content change & to provide a mechanism that will facilitate communication of these changes to others. Then, the site must be tested. When the launch occurs, there must be a handover brief and documentation for those who will go on to maintain the site. Finally, in the close, training and development needs must be assessed, the project must be reviewed, and performance analysis must be done to the site.

There was so much information in this presentation packed into a very short period of time, that I’m necessarily cutting out details. I guess the key concepts that I took away were the need for an entire project management process for the website redesign. From the beginning of a website redesign, we librarians have to ask the right questions – to ourselves and to our end-users (who are key stakeholders) – to understand what we really want to do before we begin and thus how we will evaluate our success.

cil2007

Ditch Simplicity, Embrace Desirability

In the Web Manager’s Academy at CIL2007, Jeff Wisniewski followed Darlene Fichter with a couple of presentations – one on User Experience, the other on why Design Matters. Some great points were made in these presentations & really got me fired up – now I just want to share what I've learned, so...

Jeff began by reminding us of Jakob Nielsen’s law “Users spend most of their time on sites other than your site.” Therefore, we librarians have to keep monitoring how the web is changing and changing user expectations. What’s going on out there? Jeff sees that today’s most beloved websites are very visual, highly personalized, highly interactive, and user-generated.

He noted that a key facet of successful website design is one that librarians have been ignoring – ensuring that a site is not only usable, accessible, and findable, but that it is also desirable, valuable, and truly useful from the patrons’ perspective.

Jeff also quoted Don Norman of the Nielsen/Norman Group, who said – of website design – “simplicity is a myth whose time has passed, if it ever existed.” This rings so true. Just think of the most used sites on the web – Amazon, craigslist, Yahoo – many of these might be described as being too busy or complex by librarians, but they are highly successful among the public. An experiment conducted by Amazon in which it randomly swapped its “busier” original homepage with a simpler model of its homepage (in usability testing, this is called the A-B method) showed that sales went down significantly on the simpler version of the page.

We also know that the Rich Internet Applications (RIA’s) have raised the bar for user expectations of our websites. They’re coming to except AJAX-like functionality, sliders to change data dynamically in the page without reloading it, for example. Google Suggest is another excellent example.

What resonated with me most deeply in this session was this quote from Jeff:

“Is the religion of simplicity something we should perhaps rethink?”

Ah, sigh…

I believe that the “simplicity” model that led so many librarians to argue for an old school design – say, of static html pages with little in the way of graphics and no scripting/programming/interactivity - was probably just the one concept that really stuck in their minds and so they kept reiterating it. Certainly the simplicity mantra seemed to make practical sense. Plus it was easier to achieve. Keep it simple. But really, I think that what the librarians in question didn’t realize was that the back-end had to continue to upgrade, to grow more complex to meet user needs, and that the mantra of simplicity was only applicable insofar as a website should be simple for the end-user to master.

Jeff also talked about how important the visual design of the website is to users. A large body of research now clearly demonstrates that there is a large gap between how people say they judge websites and the criteria they actually use. They often say that they are interested in content, but in reality, we find that the true criteria that people use to determine the credibility of a website – the far and away most important factor is the design look – does the website impress them as being visually attractive and professional-looking? In fact, here’s the breakdown of factors people used to judge a website’s credibility:

1. Design look 46.1%
2. Info Architecture/Structure 28.5%
3. Information focus 25.1%
4. Motive 15.5%
5. Usefulness of info 14.8%
6. Accuracy of info 14.3%
7. Identity of site sponsor 8.8%

So clearly, look of the site is of the great importance – it is a key factor in the success of your site (so clearly, a key reason to redesign if your site is underperforming). But here’s where the news gets a little worse for most librarian web designers – you have only 50 milliseconds to make a good impression. And then it gets even worse – if a user’s initial impression of the site was negative, even if a website is highly usable & provides highly useful information presented in a logical arrangement, the user will still hold that negative first impression of the site in their mind and this will outweigh the other factors.

cil2007

Web Managers’ Academy Overview (CIL2007)

The focus of the web managers’ academy at the Computers in Libraries (CIL) 2007 preconferences was “Survival Guide for Library Web Site Redesigns”. With seven small presentations, capped by a group exercise, the event was an all-day extravaganza that left this library webhead spinning!

The presenters were: Darlene Fichter, Head, Indigenous Studies Portal, University of Saskatchewan; Jeff Wisniewski, Web Services Librarian, University of Pittsburgh; Frank Cervone, Assistant University Librarian for Information Technology, Northwestern University; and Marshall Breeding, Library Technology Officer, Vanderbilt University. All knowledgeable, excellent, and fun!

In the first presentation, Darlene Fichter went over the levels at which a library website redesign activity can occur. She cited the 5 “layers” of a website that Jesse James Garret identified in The Elements of User Experience:

• Surface/visual design
• Skeleton – interface, interaction, and info design
• Structure – information architecture, interaction design
• Scope – functional requirements, content
• Strategy – user needs, objectives.

These “layers” are listed in order of most superficial to most profound. The level of redesign that you are doing will, of course, dictate both how difficult and long the process will be. Theoretically, a surface change can be quick and fairly painless, in contrast with a change in strategy or scope.

Additionally, Darlene reminded us that the website is seen by the end-user in its totality. So even if only the interface is “visible” to the user, the more labor-intensive “invisible” aspects of the site (such as its architecture) provide the framework that ensures the site’s success.

She also raised the issue that many library websites were developed as just a “thin veneer over” traditional library services and organizational structures. This is not the best model for website development.

Darlene noted that successful library websites are:

• externally focused
• have sophisticated design
• employ multiple approaches
• offer users discovery tools (are designed to enable social discovery as well)

She finished up this presentation with the notion offered by Kathy Sierra in her “Creating Passionate Users”: if you’re just tweaking the site, there’s only so far you’ll ever get in making your site successful. To get where you NEED to be, you need to provide “revolutionary” improvements.

cil2007

Website Redesign Survival AM session

(wrote this yday - no free wi-fi outside of the conf rooms, so couldn't post, oh well...)
A little over 1/2 way thru the Web Manager's Academy at CIL2007. Excellent presentations by Jeff Wisniewski, Darlene Fichter, Frank Cervone & Marshall Breeding have thusfar touched on:

• User Experience & Design Matters
• Project Mgt for Redesign
• Content Management Systems
• Social Software: Blogs & Wikis

From these AM sessions, a few points have really resonated with me:

• The need to continually survey what your users are experiencing elsewhere on the web, because that's what sets their expectations (they really don't spend that much time on your library site, let's be honest, compared to the other web resources they're using)
• The importance of making your website visually appealing and "desirable". Usability, accessibility, heck, even quality content, are not enough to compel users to come to your site.
• The notion that simplicity in a website is not all that it's cracked up to be
• The crucial importance of a systematic project management approach to website redesign
• The importance of user-centered design, usability testing (more the practical vs. the focus group approach, since people will say one thing and do another) -- an evidence-based approach to website design removes the squabbling over fonts, colors, etc., which can be matters of personal opinion & can be very different among staff than among members of the public
• The importance, of course, of separating content from presentation

I'll do a few more posts detailing content from the day's presentations, so look for them

cil2007