Design contest, team meeting

A few of our members held a team meeting on the 26th of february to discuss the design contest we will start soon. Below are the meeting minutes.

1 Topics

• Share.ez.no design contest
• Knowledge content for beginners

2 Participants

Robin, Andrew, Nicolas

3 Design contest

Goal: organizing the revamp of the current share.ez.no

3.1 Deliverables (by the team)

It will represent the final output of the preliminary work of our team. The current outline is probably close to final, but the content, particularly the "Functional Brief" section are to be augmented. In order to be able to deliver this, the first step will be to ask ourselves how we would like the community portal to function. A first step can be to identify the 3 or 4 prominent functions of this website, and focus on making them useful, ergonomic, intuitive, easy to use. While we initially were thinking of building wireframes, it turned out this could not be the most relevant approach. One risk is to force a designer into a too rigid schema, limiting her creativity, freedom and fun during thinking the design.

Instead, our collaboration could focus on :

• Finding out and explaining to a potential designer what content matters. It is then up to her to display it, arrange it in a relevant manner, and "functionnally enable" the design.
• Along with the first point: describe the content taxonomy: content classes, their attributes, of which the metadata and the actual content.
• Give a clear hint on the content structure: content tree, sitemap.

All of this bearing in mind to give as much freedom and as few constraints as possible to the person interpreting our descriptions, and eventually implementing them into a design, a User Interface.

3.2 Planning

End of march: content description complete

Actions:

• Nicolas: outline of the content description document [google doc]
• Robin: elaborating on the outline
• Andrew and others volunteering: iterating on the document, to make it final and encompassing the agreed-upon view on functional aspects of the community portal

3.3 Tools

In case wireframing is required (can ease functional description if need be), a tool works fine: http://gomockingbird.com/mockingbird/

4 Learning material for beginners

This topic was brought up after insistent requests from within the community. By example:

• http://share.ez.no/forums/general/decreasing-time-required-to-grasp-ez-publish
• http://share.ez.no/forums/general/time-needed-to-grasp-ez-publish/

Currently no distinction is clearly made between beginner's knowledge material and more advanced one. Articles and tutorials are in question here. An idea could be to tag such content after the required skills to best benefit from it:

• Beginner
• Experienced
• Expert

The immediate corollary of this is to give the possibility to easily filter this type of content after level, and possibly other facets (subject: hosting, software design, project/business case; function: search, syndication, mobile, social media, ...).

In short: Having more beginner-oriented material may require first an adjustement in the tutorials & articles organization.

Let's keep this subject in mind, and address it more thoroughly next meeting.