Project Overview
The Maritime Union of Australia (MUA) represents over 11,000 Australian maritime workers. As a key affiliate of the International Transport Workers’ Federation, it also helps to represent 320,000 of the world’s seafarers, who depend on ITF affiliates like the MUA for wage justice and protection against human rights abuse.
The MUA were seeking to redesign and rebuild their website to better serve their organisational objectives. They stressed the importance of building a website that would use new technologies to deliver compelling, relevant and timely content to their members in the workplace, whilst assisting stakeholders when organising union-related events and campaigns.
Digital Eskimo completed our scoping process, anchoring the direction and priorities for future work, and defining project objectives, stakeholders and opportunities. During the scoping process we identified use cases to represent ways these objectives might be met.
These use cases where used as the basis of an iterative design and development cycle which had 3 full iterations prior to the launch of the website. The MUA and Digital Eskimo are now working together to continue the iterative evolution of the website.
Iterative development in practice
The scoping process for this site generated a huge number of relevant user stories. Using the MoSCoW (Must, Should, Could, Would) method, those user stories went through a round of prioritisation. When the vast majority of user stories were deemed by the client to be “musts”, it became clear that a further round of prioritisation would be required.
Before the second round of prioritisation, the development team reviewed the user stories in question and assigned a ‘technical weighting’ to them which gave the client the information they required to prioritise in context. With an understanding of the complexity and associated, notional cost of each user story they were able to make better informed prioritisations.
The development of the MUA website was completed over a cycle of 3 iterations. Each iteration focused on completed sets of user stories and creating a demonstrable product at the iteration’s conclusion. By grouping user stories into themed sets we were able to recognise the key user flows and to start getting a picture of the possible information architecture.
Iteration 1
It was clear that certain elements of the site were fairly “domain neutral” (e.g., news and events pages) and those more generic user stories were selected as the focus of the first iteration. The team participated in a number of workshops addressing the user interface issues that required resolution.
The outcome of these ‘GUI jams’ was a set of annotated wireframes, user flows and use cases that were used to brief both the design and development teams concurrently. Over the course of the first iteration, basic look and feel were developed and presented to the client as the generic functionality was developed and tested by the development team.
By the completion of the first iteration the look and feel had been presented to the client and approved and elements of the design had been integrated with the rough version of the site that was starting to take shape.
Iteration 2
The second iteration focussed more heavily on development while the designs evolved to incorporate changes created by new additions as further functionality was created. The development focus allowed us to address a number of the domain-specific requirements such as branch pages, industry pages and an initial homepage.
By the end of the iteration the website was sufficiently complete that it could have been launched as a beta, had the client wished – the majority of site sections were complete, RSS feeds and print styles were implemented, some content had been migrated via automated scripts and the CMS was fully operational.
However the MUA decided to continue developing for a further iteration to allow for sufficient testing, a site wide content review and edit. The iteration concluded with a release to staging, a product demonstration to senior management, a final iteration review and planning session for Iteration 3.
Iteration 3
Prior to the iteration planning meeting for this period of work, a set of use cases relating to mobile video functionality was initially included for this release.
However political imperatives within the organisation shifted priorities towards the promotion of MUA’s links to the International Transport Workers Federation. As such, user stories relating to the inclusion of mapping technology were prioritised, setting the ground work for future augmentation in that area.
Over the course of this iteration the client used the CMS to add, review and edit content which served the dual purpose of prepping the content for release while simultaneously being a significant period of user acceptance testing, the MUA reporting any bugs in the project tracking software as they arose.
A number of generic content areas, including the “About” and “contacts” sections where completed, as well as implementation of search functionality and global affiliations pages. Designs for these areas were refined and completed concurrently with their development.
At the completion of iteration 3, we were ready to launch having completed all “Must have” use cases and addressed a number of high priority ‘Should haves’. The majority of content had been transfered onto the site, significant testing had been completed.
Finalisation and deployment
Rather than launching immediately, the client was keen to spend a final period allowing the site to “bed in” whilst adding further content and reporting any bugs. The site was deployed to the production servers but the DNS transfer was not completed until five days later.
Outcomes
The MUA website was launched on the 3rd of June, 2009. We are now working together under a Preferred Service Agreement (PSA) to augment the site with features that were not launch priorities. Initial engagement with the site has been promising with the first online campaign delivering a target of 500 responses after less than two weeks online.
View Website
Credits
- Creative Director : David Gravina
- Executive Producer: Anthony Ditton
- Producer: Michelle Gilmore
- Technical Lead: Rob Aston
- Designers: Chris Gaul, Soraya Asmar
- Developer: Jeremy Epstein, Simon Lichfield
