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.
MUA and Digital Eskimo are now working together to continue the maintenance and nurturing of the web site as a core communications platform for the MUA.
Outcomes
The MUA website was launched on the 3rd of June, 2009. The MUA has successfully influenced the detail and timing of national shipping reform legislation through a campaign supported in part by emails from the site. The site was very well received by the union rank and file and is a focal point for the communications team who regularly update it with news and video content.
Iterative development
The scoping process for this site generated a number of Personas each with a sizable number of user stories. User Stories are simple sentence statements of a person and the specific task that they need a design to do, for e.g. ‘As a user i want to be kept up to date on the latest MUA news’. See here for more information.
Using the MoSCoW prioritisation method (Must include, Should include, Could include if there is time, Won’t include at this stage but keep it in mind for the future), those user stories were ranked to ensure we tackled the important ones first. When the bulk of the user stories were deemed by the MUA 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 MUA the information they required to prioritise the stories more accurately. With an understanding of the complexity and associated approximate cost of each user story they were able to make more granular 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 & 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 and approved by the client 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 Content Management System (CMS) was fully operational. However the MUA decided to continue developing for a further iteration to allow for further testing as well as a site wide content review & 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 strategic 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 was able to report 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 transferred onto the site, significant testing had been completed.
Finalisation and deployment
Rather than launching immediately, we spent a final period allowing the site to “bed in” whilst adding further content and bug reporting to be completed. The site was deployed to the production servers and the DNS transfer was completed five days later resulting in an exceptionally stable release.
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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
