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Dedication. The only way to work.

Written by Andy Weir. Posted on February 15, 2011. Filed under about us, Blog, Future gazing, production, project management, work. Tagged , , , , , , , , . 19 Comments.

We’ve got lots of pretty big projects on at the moment, all quite varied and all for very different types of clients. We’re hoping to be able to share some of the stuff we’re doing very soon on this website, so stay tuned kids. Exciting times for WEIR+WONG! In the meantime, I have a fantastic and revealing insight into the way we are are working. I guess that nobody has ever thought about this before, let alone implemented it, so please hold on to your hats. Ladies and Gentlemen I give you……… dedicated resource. Tada. Booooooooooooooooom. I thank you.

At WEIR+WONG we have been working with some fantastic designers and developers. These guys are simply the best in the business. They uber-rock. We have allowed them to rock harder by simply giving them one job to do on a day by day basis. No daily interruptions so they can just have a quick think about ‘this other project’ or upload some changes for something they didn’t do in the first place. Robin and I are producers that like to protect our team from interruption, and dis-information.

Why is this a revelation? Because we know that from speaking to and working with other agencies resourcing is a nightmare usually based around booking up 1 hour slots. An unmanageable task for the poor resource manager and a false economy anyway. The way forward is one job, one day per any one person.

How do we do it? It’s quite simple really:

  1. We book resource per job and not based on a bunch of time that can be used up on a multitude of different projects.
  2. A morning scrum. What did we do yesterday, What are we doing today, What’s stopping me do it?
  3. An open channel of communication throughout the day with the rest of the team. Don’t go to the producer if you need a design asset. Speak to the designer. Remember that building complex stuff should always be a conversation between creatives and techies. If it isn’t then something is wrong.
  4. Limited interruptions from producers. Save them up for the next Scrum.
  5. A prioritised list of functionality and features. If you finish something early, get working on the next bit and don’t ask anyone for permission.

So what benefits have we seen. Lots. We can’t think of any negatives either.

  1. Creative people have the head space to think laterally and focus on the proposition and user experience. We don’t really care when, where or how they arrive at the solution. In fact we trust them to arrive at the solution, and we seem to be finding better solutions faster these days.
  2. Technicians and developers can get themselves in the ‘coding zone’ without interruption. We’re being delivered better, more robust code that is tested and clearly has had more love given to it.
  3. Client and agency feedback is turned around much quicker. We can react quicker to change and produce more robust and thought out solutions.
  4. People like working with us. Their day is less stressful.
  5. We like working like this. Our day is less stressful.

But I guess that everyone knows this already. It’s pretty obvious that dedicated workers can only be a positive thing. So what gives with my sarcastic take that this is a new insight. Well, if you aren’t doing it yet it is a new insight. And most agencies and production companies aren’t.

This can change. Believe.

The online banking itch

Written by Andy Weir. Posted on October 6, 2010. Filed under Blog, production, project management, Review, Uncategorized. Tagged , , , , , , , , . No comments.


What is the overall image that a bank wants to portray online? Friendly and trustworthy? Accessible to all? Or just secure, solid, impenetrable. I ask the question because I am only ever left with the latter impression. that my experience when banking online has to be difficult, cumbersome, obtuse – in order to gain the impression that there are solid walls of steel, concrete, marble around me and that a security guard is monitoring my every move whilst I am ‘in the bank’.
A comfortable, efficient user experience is something the banking website designers simply don’t address. Are they told not to? Do they have Information Architects? Will it get better?
Let me explain a bit about some of the experiences I have had with a couple of different banks. Some of these just simply would not be stood for if they were any other product / brand?

  1. A customer number, my surname, a card reader, a passcode, a memorable word. All of them just to enter the site. Talk about ‘barriers to entry’. How is this attracting people to use their services?
  2. Immediately after logging in being displayed an add for a loan / extra credit etc. the equivalent of a pre-roll, extremely interruptive and very much like having a leaflet thrust in my face whilst waiting in the queue at the bank for the teller. Not nice.
  3. Viewing statements. Why are they only available for a month? Surely this data just exists anyway in the same database? Why can’t I see it? It just means that I will carry on requesting paper statements – costing the bank more money in print costs (which I really don’t want).
  4. Paying someone for the first time. After going through the extensive security previously mentioned, on paying someone I haven’t paid before I then have to use my card reader again to verify their account details to make the payment.
  5. Not being able to give an individual payment a reference number. Surely that’s just one extra data field. It doesn’t really help me or the recipient of the payment to identify the payment.
  6. Help. The help sections on banking websites are the most useless sections ever. They rarely answer your specific enquiry – meaning that you have to phone up the bank and use their telephone banking system (which deserves a separate blog post of it’s own). The telephone banking guys must know the kind of questions that come up time and time again. Maybe they’d get less enquiries if they disseminated some of the information online.

I guess the bigger question here is whether banks actually care. How many times have you changed your bank? It’s most likely that the same bank that gave you a free pencil case, ruler and eraser when you opened your junior savers bank account at the age of 14 is probably the same bank you have now.
So what would it take for someone to change their provider. Clearly the banks think that the online user experience isn’t going to have much of an influence over these types of decisions. Unless we start demanding an easier user experience and threatening to leave to find pastures new, I’m not sure anything will change. So Barclays, Nat West and RBS – you have been warned. I, for one, am getting a ’20 year itch’.

WhatTheFont for iPhone

Written by Andy Weir. Posted on July 28, 2010. Filed under Blog, mobile, production, project management. Tagged , , , , , , . 12 Comments.

42 days, 17 hours and 20 seconds. A conservative estimate of the amount of time I’ve wasted over the years hunting high and low, trying to identify a specific font.

No longer. A dream.

Fanning the flames

Written by Andy Weir. Posted on March 10, 2010. Filed under Blog, Future gazing, production, Review. Tagged , , , , , , . 28 Comments.

Imagine a one stop shop where you could create your own interactive campaign’s regardless of whether you are an ad agency, large corporation or even small business. It would be able to create sweepstakes, contests, give-aways, incentive-based surveys, publish them on your website and seed them to multiple social networks at the same time. They would be able to skin the campaign in any way you wished. You need not be a complete geek to create the campaign. You can easily monitor stats and there is a scaleable pricing model.

Imagine no more. Wildfire is here. It’s creating a lot of buzz and is indeed a finalist in the Microsoft BizSpark Accelerator at the SXSW event.
Wildfire Process
A truly innovative idea that capitalizes on emerging technologies and turns it into something extremely useful. Competitions, campaigns and promotions tend to be seen by many agencies as ‘dirty work’ as it involves many third parties (coupon providers, mail drops, Social networks tech teams and APIs, hosting providers) and logistical challenges. It seems that Wildfire are taking the donkey work out of this process for us all and joining a lot of the dots. Good luck to them and we’ll certainly keep them in mind for our client’s promotions in the future.

Missing a trick?

Written by Andy Weir. Posted on February 15, 2010. Filed under Blog, mobile, production, Review. Tagged , , , , , , . 37 Comments.

Is it just me or does the App store on the iPhone disappoint? Every time I use it I find it extremely difficult to find what I’m after. It seems that the idea of a stripped down App store for the iPhone platform is fundamentally self defeating for Apple. I look for apps when I am using my iPhone. I don’t look for Apps when I’m at my laptop (My laptop doesn’t use apps!), so it seems bizarre that the functionality of the iPhone App store is stripped right back from the one online. Apparently if I am looking on an iPhone for apps then I am only iterested in what is in the top 25 or what is being featured by Apple. Apple likes to tell us that there are 100s of thousands of Apps on the store but i only get to find out about the ones that everyone else buys, which limits the range to alarm clocks, simple games and expensive Grand Theft Auto type £5 revenue fests. Come on, there has to be more out there than this? I want Apple to have another go at this interface. I want the following:

  • I want to be suggested apps that friends of mine have bought.
  • People that downloaded this, downloaded this too.
  • I want to know what apps people in my city use.
  • I want to say what my job is and have apps suggested to me.
  • I want to subscribe to App alerts that tell me when a new app has been released that might interest me.
  • I want it to show me more.
  • I want Genius to work better. It just seems to suggest apps based on the fact I have one other app like it.

I want…. I want…… iWant.

When can change happen?

Written by Robin Wong. Posted on January 27, 2010. Filed under production, project management. Tagged , , , , . 24 Comments.

left a bit, right a bit
I just read an interesting article over on lifehacker about putting the brakes on ideas at certain times during the production process. You start a project, come up with some great ideas, focus on the best, start work on bringing those ideas to life, and then along comes an idea that you wish you’d have thought of in the first place. What do you do? Drop tools and replan? Ignore this distraction for now and address it at a later phase?

Well there’s obviously several schools of thought, but 2 things are clear. First, great ideas should never be dismissed, especially if they add more value to the end user. Second – and this is the counterbalance to the first idea – change is only worthwhile if it doesn’t reduce the overall value of what you’re trying to achieve. If changing course and incorporating a new idea means you can’t realise all the other great ideas you had because of all the extra planning and changes you’ll have to make, then clearly park it for later.

The next conundrum revolves around the question “when is it a good time to change”. For an agile project, I would argue that embracing change is a central part of how one approaches a project, but this does not equate to having carte blanche at any time to throw new ideas into the ring. For me, if you’re using a sprint model, then at the start (or possibly end) of each sprint, the team should evaluate their priorities and decide what is going to add the most overall value. Until the next sprint, the team should stay focused on achieving these priorities. Any ideas that pop up, can be parked until the end of the sprint, when they can be considered by the team again.

There will always be exceptional circumstances when this isn’t the case, and you may need to down tools to investigate if you should change course, but I believe those situations should be kept to a minimum. I’ve seen teams change course all too quickly mid-sprint, to the detriment of the project and the morale of the team. Waiting until the end of a sprint is often a short period of time, and if it doesn’t come soon enough for the impatient, try a shorter sprint on the next project.