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Initial design interview with Team USA

19 June 2010 | admin | 1 Comments

Jason: I’m Jason Santa Maria from Team USA and I’m doing designing.
Liz: Liz Danzico from Team USA and I’m UX Advocate.

You guys just met your client today and you’re about five hours into the 24 hour sprint. You would have identified some main objectives/goals. What are they?

Jason: We promised them we would stay awake for most of the time, and that they would hopefully see a site at the end of it. The objectives I think are finding the voice, not only for them as an organisation — we’re doing a website for the Timaru Mental Health Support Trust/Victoria House — and we’ve already rebranded them to be Victoria House with the byline being Timaru Mental Health Support Trust. So, Step 1 *woo* that’s a very good thing and that will also influence the domain that they have. The objectives are to bring their message online because they don’t have a website, and to do it in a very clear way that will service not only their clients but also people who might be interested in using their services for a loved one or a friend or someone else that they know.

Who’s the audience and how would the audience impact the design that you are going to come up with?

Liz: So it’s a very sensitive subject, obviously, as their clients are primarily the people who would use their services but they don’t talk about them as services. They go to this Victoria House that Jason mentioned, which is a place that offers all sorts of services including planning activities to get them to work, back to work if they haven’t been working but also there’s a lot of activities at the house itself; wood-working, guitar lessons, pottery, all kinds of sports and things like that. Those are the kinds of things that people would do but loved ones, potential caregivers and also people that aren’t in the South Island where they are, people on the North Island, people outside NZ, all kinds of people that are just interested in mental health and learning more about it, so it has a pretty wide audience. But out primary audience is the clients themselves who would go to this location.

So you guys would have had a crash course in NZ geography to figure out exactly where everything is. Where are you guys at with visuals, are you still conceptualizing or do you have pixels that you are pushing around?

Jason: We’re kind of in both areas right now, we’re still conceptualising some things but other areas of the site and different pages we kindof already know where we wanna go with them so we’ve started on some of them. A lot of things are happening concurrently and we’ve completely obviously thrown out our waterfall process altogether and it’s kindof this simultaneous obstacle course process.

Liz: Yeah, we’ve got this great process where we taped sketches to the monitors, it’s working really well for us.

Earlier you guys said you were going to skip Omnigraffle and stuff and do Sharpie wireframes but I see you were using Omnigraffle.

Liz: What happened? You know taping the sketches to the Omnigraffle sketches is working out really well. We’re using Omnigraffle to do sitemaps because it’s really, really fast and then some of the pages that we know are just going to be sortof generic templates, all the sortof standard pages, we’re just doing in Omnigraffle because it’s just really fast. There’s a combination of sketches and Omnigraffle.

I saw you were working on the logo, do you have anything you can show us or talk about?

Jason: I mostly whipped those up really quickly once we sold them on the idea of a definite name structure. I just wanted to whip up something that would hold the place in the comps just so we could allow some space for it. Even if those logos are the best that we can do in the time that we’ve got because everything is sortof pressing, it’s a huge step forward. Hopefully there’s time to go back and make those a lot better.

How do you think your team as a whole is working so far? Is everything on track?

Jason: It’s been a little bit trying. Liz is not a very nice person and Dan won’t speak to John anymore. There’s been a bit of a battle I’d say.

Liz: Jason knows I hate the colour red but [points to Jason's red hoody] none the less. There’s a little bit of that. We actually developed a schedule as I mentioned before and then it was Jason’s idea to put all the tasks on post-its because we knew everything was going to change over the course of the day. So over the course of the day we’ve been moving the post-its around and changing the schedule just so we don’t get time to going about things one particular way. It’s been good so far.

Jason: It’s been working well, I mean, by the end of the day they will all be lined up in one row.

Liz: I’m not sure we knew exactly what to expect so this is about what I expected.

Tags: design, gossip, Team USA, UX