- Fairfax have learnt a lot about iterative design since starting the redesign of their site
- Responsive redesign of SMH is a massive project with many contributors: designers, developers, engineers, everyone at fairfax.
- SMH was founded in 1931, committed to honest accountable journalism
- SMH went online in 1995, a trial blazer of getting online in the news world.
- Before getting too excited, it did look a bit shit (my words, not theirs).
- For many people smh.com.au is the SMH, the paper may not be picked up
- The site is made up of partner sites, video, etc
- The site is used on a number of devices, mobiles on public transport, tablets in the evening
- Fairfax wanted to people to be able to reach the content regardless of devices
- They put together a dream team to work on the RWD site.
- For the new site, they needed designers to be able to design an element and put it in the CMS. Not currently possible
- There were five defining mantras they referred back to often, even now.
- Fairfax wanted to move away from multiple dev streams: m-dot, desktop, etc to a single dev stream: rwd.
- SMH went with an adaptive layout
- SMH had fallen behind the a-game. Ganiad already had a RWD site.
- Mobile geddon had arrived. SMH did not have a “tablet” site.
- SMH’s RWD team take performance very seriously, faster, faster, faster.
- They made hard calls about what was in and out. No way to redesign entire site in 18 months, too complex.
- they new they needed to change their process: iterative design over waterfall
- Mandates:
- No wireframes (initially), 60 minute design sessions to get a live prototype
- Quick’n’dirty: quality kept with design principles, style guides.
- Screen agnostics: impacted the design approach by going tablet first after a false start. Tablet is where RWD lives or dies.
- Lean user testing: less users more often.
- Sharing is caring: content (article) is the new home page, people visit news sites via social media
- Decide with data: testing gets feedback, beta site allows further testing.
- They gave the project the code name project lego. Building blocks not pages.
- Using building blocks, they can build and trial a site quickly
- Using A/B testing to discover the difference between what people wanted and what people thought they wanted.
- At Fairfax they are still learning about RWD,
- never test on yourself, test on the user
- don’t hide what you are doing
- rules will change, design for today
- Features will always be improving, this is not a design that will finish.
- Fairfax found they needed freedom to fail
Written by
in Notes.
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