Adaptive Path Blog

Last spring we received an email from a very professional and passionate-sounding high-school junior at the Marin School of Arts and Technology (MSAT). John Bjerke is his name, and he had just signed up for the redesign of his school’s website. He asked to come work with us at Adaptive Path two days a week as he moved through this big undertaking. We jumped for the opportunity, and it turned out to be a great one.

John has just written to inform me that the redesigned MSAT site is live. John deserves some big praise for his work — but to really appreciate it, you should: take a look at its prior incarnation; consider that John took on this huge project by himself; and learn about all John went through to make it happen…

Being a public magnet school that relies on recruiting applicants to build the school’s student base, the web site serves a critical role in the “business” of education. Meanwhile, the site also serves as the online point of contact between teachers and students as well as an information source for parents. Uh-oh: 4 audiences and only 1 designer/developer/project manager.

Here’s the process that John followed to make it possible:

1. Talk to the stakeholders. John started by defining expectations with the faculty and staff at MSAT, as well as the prior caretaker of the site.
2. Know what you’ve got. Next was an exhaustive inventory of the prior MSAT website’s content and inventory. John found a few things he never knew was there. Sound familiar?
3. Learn from the end users. John had users of the site categorize the site’s content and functionality as well as propose names for these categories.
4. Design for the goals of each user. Starting with whiteboard sketches and page mock-ups, John went through multiple iterations of the site navigation and layout to provide pathways for each user to their goals on the site.
5. Criteria-driven visual design. Visual design was something John was uneasy about tackling, so we took a very objective approach. We defined criteria for the visual design, then looked to other sites, magazines, and other sources to inspire the visual direction.
6. Iterative development. Back in John’s comfort zone, he knocked out working code in a number of days, integrating the content with TextPattern as he worked.
7. Strong handoff. After migrating web hosts (ouch), testing, and releasing the site, John’s handed off the content maintenance to two dedicated parent volunteers logged into the Textpattern system as content editors.

We hope and think that John got as much out of the experience as we did. It was a pleasure to watch someone pick the UX methods that made sense to them, plow through the process, and elegantly pull together a series of web-based tools to make it happen.

Wow. What were you doing when you were in high school?
John, thanks for working with us and impressing us.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 7th, 2006 at 3:53 pm and is filed under Experience Design, Friends of Adaptive Path. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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