Archive for the ‘design’ tag
Website Information Architecture
Work done by Ben and Ed, with input from the Network crew. It’s never firm, everything changes, but here’s our working model for launch. Any suggestions?
Of particular discussion in the network office is the use of the word ‘initiative’ for a primary navigation (at the top). It’s about information relating to the Transition Towns movement/community/initiatives.. we’re a bit stuck!
Transition Network website IA
Here it is in text format:
Transition Network website Information Architecture V1
04/02/10: Totnes
**NB** Edited 09/02 to reflect further discussions:
Design V3
It really doesn’t do Laura’s work justice, just taking a screengrab.
Her design goes all the way through the system, re-skinning the administration functions for users, tweaking out drupal standard elements (“… remove that clutter, sigh, mutter, mutter…”), including print versions of pages within the css, considering third level navigation within the community microsites for different user types, putting lots of design elements in the css in order to make the pages lighter and therefore more energy effiicient on the server etc. etc.
Either way, we’re in serious motion now – as said before, simple, clean, usable, elegant:
Users and roles
That’s right folks, we’re using the word ‘user’. We love you dearly and know that you are humans with hearts and souls, but the word is so useful that we can’t avoid it. Just to prove it, here’s a photo of one (representing his local TT initiative at a Bristol street fayre):
Dan from TT Montpelier with his 'wish tree'
So now we’ve got that out the way, here’s our view on the different users and their related roles in our system. Dan will be a ‘primary point of contact’ and ‘Initiative Profile admin’ (not that he knows that yet)…
Anyone spots anything amiss, let us know and we’ll be very grateful – here’s a direct cc from our workspace:
Note: (You all know this, but I’m guessing many users of the site don’t…) Roles, like the permisions they wrap up, are cumulative. This means that users should be given the right combination of roles to do the job. For example, the Administrator role does NOT need to write newsletters or develop the site, so if an Administrator needs those facilities, they get given the ‘Newsletter Writer’ and ‘Developer’ roles as appropriate – rather than bloating and complicating the Administrator role. This is Jim Kirkpatrick’s work…
Adoption phases following website launch
This is a pretty ‘workflow-y’ post to provide the basics of the three ‘adoption’ phases we envisage following the launch of the website. It’s quite long as there is a lot to say! Getting a website online is one thing; having people use it is another.
The community nature of the Transition Network web platform means that it will only ’succeed’ (beyond being a news site) if the movement adopt it as their own. So it’s a gamble that there is enough value in the service to encourage transitioners to use it.
This is an old, old, online community management challenge, and one we are really looking forward to experiencing; everyone says that they want a community site – the question is – once we’ve launched it, and call out to transitioners to adopt it, will we all make the effort to make it a valuable community asset by adding our details? 
Departures board in a Star Wars style
We have identified three key phases to gradually introduce transitioners to the new and lovely site. The phases start with the vital but relatively simple bit where we update our initiative profile pages, and gradually get more interesting…
We are relatively easy about timings; we won’t move from one phase to another until we are happy that it’s OK; it’s a community project, not a corporate marketing gig. And please excuse the word ‘user’; it’s a useful technical term and, really, reflects that we are all ‘using’ the service.
Three ‘phases’:
- Pre-launch communications (phase 0)
- Pre-launch warm up mail to all official points of contact
- Initiative and User Profile adoption (phase 1: February)
- Post-launch welcome email to official points of contact
- Post-launch welcome email to all registered users
- Mullers adding themselves to directory (phase 2: late February/early March all things going well)
- Welcome email to all mullers (scraped off the google maps)
- Community Microsites (phase 3: late March, early April all things going well)
- Gentle approach to beta-testers from EM’s list of likely people
- Beta-testing activity
- Wider opening up to all wiki users
Design layer V1
Laura’s first run on the interface (ie this is the basic scaffolding for the design).
Here the news page:
TT website design theme V1
As she says
“It’s very grey at present – before you all faint in horror… – there is a reason for this – it’s mainly to mark out some of the block/sidebar type regions and so I can test full functionality before adding all the pretty bits over the coming days. If we’re happy with the general framework and regions* (*see below on explanation of regions so far) I can take feedback and move forward with the more graphical elements and custom areas of the site, thus removing grey css overload…”
Now that is what we call design – not just interface, a fully layered approach to the interactions the site aims to afford. And of course it’s clean, simple, flexible, handy to use, easy to read, easy to administer…
Features
For those of you with an interest in technical design and what goes on under the bonnet of a web project, I thought I’d share some of our documentation.
This is copied out of work done by Jim Kirkpatrick, one of the two key developers, from the Transition Technologist shared workspace and is not complete, but it’s stonking good stuff and thought you might like it too.
Jim’s work follows the picture…
Eveything will be OK in the end
—> Jim’s work –>
17 Jan: News and Events features now updated to take account of the changes in content types. Contexts also added to aid theming and panels usage. Updating DEV and SVN late this eve.
Please peruse and comment at your leisure – Jim:
“Initiatives Directory” Feature
Only contains a set of views for now and replaces the original ‘Initiatives Directory’ view to add several improvements.
Views
“initiatives_directory” View
- Defaults – Return only published Initiative Profiles, sorted by date updated (newest first).
- Recently Updated block – Returns 5 most recently updated initiatives.
- Directory Page – As defaults but is a table view showing title, location, and status sorted by title and exposes Community Type filters and Status (Mulling/Official) as options to user. Also takes argument of first letter of initiative so that the directory tabs in special header I added allows a user to jump to all initiatives starting with, say, ‘A’.
- All Recent/Official Recent feeds – A feed listing the all the recent initiatives, or just those with ‘Official’ status.
- By Country Page – Returns all Initiatives for a given country code
Community microsites offer
The Community Microsites are very simple websites for TT initiatives who don’t or can’t have their own website but want to stay in touch with their members. They consist of editable pages (like the current wiki but better, a news blog, events diary, community newsletter, and simple membership management.
Here is a diagram outlining the Community Microsite offer:
Community Microsite Information Architecture
What will happen when?
Our first focus following the launch of the new Transition Network website will be to help initiatives update their Initiative Profile Page which appears in the Initiative Profile Directory. It’s impossible to predict but we hope that this will be fully moving by Mid-February.
Once that is done, we will be inviting a few initiatives to try out the Community Microsites before we invite all of the initiatives currently using the wiki to give them a go. As above, we are not in control of how people adopt the system, but hope that the early initiatives using the microsites could be trialling them by the end of February – so we can open them up proper in early Spring.
Development site screengrab
And here is the development site with a little bit of a design layer on it:
Transition Network development site screengrab
Website information architecture
This is work in progress of the ‘information architecture’ for the new website – we’re not quite there yet, but it’s what we’re working on…
Website IA V4
Social networks and how they fit into the web strategy
There is a lot of Transition Movement action going on in social networks all over the world. This is great; keep it up (as long as it’s not detracting from your ‘physical world’).
There have been a lot of conversations about how social networks and other third party ‘community service providers’ fit into the web project, ranging from ‘why can’t we have something better than Ning/Google etc.?’ to ‘why bother build anything at all when Ning/Google etc. exists?’, via ‘didn’t you know that Ning/Googleetc. are evil and why are you even mentioning their names?’.
A temptation of every community web project I’ve ever come across is to be everything to everyone; clearly this isn’t possible; the trick is to focus your limited resources on the vital stuff. So this post is about that.
How do social networks fit into the Transition web project?
