Four weeks in; One project shipped.
On my fourth week at Elevator Up (EU) I wrapped up and delivered my first project. Let’s talk about that.
Getting Started.
Getting on-boarded to a new company can be a time consuming and slow process. There is always a mountain of documentation to read, a bunch of new people to be introduced to (internal and external) and lots of meetings. Fortunately EU has a terrific Studio Manager (Tori) and she was able to cover a lot of ground quickly.
Within two days, I was setup on all the internal tools, I had my HR paperwork done, I had been walked through our history, how we think, what we focus on, what our core strengths are and most importantly where we’re heading for 2016 and beyond. Oh, and we discussed my “Kolbe Index” - I’m a 6,4,4,6 if you’re curious.
The Project.
I was introduced to a number of our clients and projects and gravitated to one of the more technical short-term projects with SmarterServices. It’s a long term engagement but the goal for our next deliverable was to architect, design and build (the frontend) for an Assessment Builder. Basically a form builder with a large set of rules and restrictions. After getting the high level overview from Aaron and the client - I spent a number of days diving into functional specs and coming up with my prioritized list of items and attributes.
Sketching, Wireframing & Design.
Emily and I started sketching on whiteboards - all of the whiteboards:
Building interfaces for software is easy if all you do is throw buttons and other form elements onto a page, but here at EU we believe that thinking for the end user is what makes a user interface magic. Turning functional specs into user actions that are intuitive and don’t need a couple of paragraphs of explanation was our goal.
Aaron popped in a couple of times to push us on thinking how we could simplify the UI even further and after a couple of revisions we did a walk through with the client.
Emily produced some amazingly gorgeous designs and after a few minor adjustments we took them to the client. Presenting to a client can be a nervous time. Especially a new client. You don’t know what to expect or how they’ll react, especially to something as subjective as design. However, Jason & Sajid were thrilled and genuinely seemed excited about the decisions we made to simplify the experience for users. Yay!
Development.
The final piece of this project was to turn our designs into semi-functional frontend templates. By “semi-functional” I mean, we’d add javascript to implement user interactions, but no data was going to be saved or passed to a backend system. SmarterServices was going to handle this.
So we threw our designs at Andrew (not literally, but almost) - the newest frontend dev on the EU team. It was his second week and we needed him to turn around these designs quickly. And that’s exactly what he did. Emily and Andrew worked together on making sure everything worked as expected and I just provided some overall direction.
There were a couple of “fun” decisions we had to make when we started development. The client had a request that we build on a framework that would enable them to potentially add other UI elements we weren’t designing. Prior to this project, they had templates built with a customized version of Bootstrap.
To purists, using Bootstrap may cause some extreme anxiety and unfortunately this project didn’t allow for us to build a custom framework. So Andy, Andrew and I had a few conversations about how we could accomplish the client’s requirement and still build code we were proud of. The end result was to continue to use Bootstrap. It was used elsewhere in the product, the client was familiar with it and using the Sass version allowed us to pick'n choose only the functionality we needed. We’ve already seen the client add other UI components without a request back to us. Making clients self-sufficient is a positive thing!
Wrap Up & Retrospective.
We wrapped up the code and delivered it (via a Github repo) and they’ve already started to integrate it within their product. I met with Emily and Andrew to discuss what went well, and what we could improve upon for our next project.
It’s important that you continually assess how you work together and with the client. By getting feedback from our team members we celebrate what we did right, and set up new practices to avoid the same challenges we faced previously.
I’m now working on a long term eCommerce project and look forward to the new challenges that will bring. Till next time!