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:
- We book resource per job and not based on a bunch of time that can be used up on a multitude of different projects.
- A morning scrum. What did we do yesterday, What are we doing today, What’s stopping me do it?
- 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.
- Limited interruptions from producers. Save them up for the next Scrum.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Client and agency feedback is turned around much quicker. We can react quicker to change and produce more robust and thought out solutions.
- People like working with us. Their day is less stressful.
- 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.
Poverty Over – A Case Study, Part 1 – Thinking
Yesterday we launched povertyover.christianaid.org.uk. It was a fantastic, yet challenging project to work on and over the next few days I’ll be describing the craft of producing this interactive infographic. I say craft because I truly believe that is what we do. We take an idea, whittle it, shape it and fashion it into something that makes sense in the digital arena. Something that the target audience will take meaning from and hopefully – share it with their friends – which was the goal of this website.
When BMB approached us with this brief we were extremely excited to be involved. Robin and I follow a lot of infographic blogs and from the outset we were enthusiastically researching these and looking for great examples of map based infographics. The thought of being paid to create infographics that moved and reacted to data, time and various other filters was very appetising.
From the outset, the data we were to display was clearly defined. For each of the existing 285 countries of the world, a statistician had put together a 500 year history (where possible) of their relative poverty or wealth. Read more here for how these figures were calculated. We were supplied a figure from between 0.1 and 1.0 for each country for every year. It was our job to make this look beautiful, allow people to explore the data in an interesting way and highlight the following key parts of the story:
1. The world has, on the most part, moved out of poverty especially over the last 60 years.
2. There are however vast parts of Africa and Asia that still have a a way to go.
3. Countries that have been extremely poor before they’ve come out of poverty.
4. With further investment, development and aid – it is possible to move the countries remaining in poverty into prosperity.
Initially we looked at many influences and considered lots of different directions for how we were going to start representing the data. We loved Aaron Koblin’s work (Robin blogged about his show at the V&A last year here) and whilst we respect what he does, we quickly realised that we needed to be extremely graphic in our communication style – which was probably quite far removed from Koblin’s work . There were quite a few variables in our brief; wealth, poverty, maps and time. We needed to be single minded in our approach to how this was represented. Here are some of the approaches and influences we looked at:
Carl and Simon – the most excellent creative team at BMB had also researched many different types of maps (this is a whole cartographic language on it’s own). They provided us with some great books like this one. We were able to find inspiration from many examples here – but also it started reinforcing lots of map do’s and don’ts!
Initially Carl and Simon were extremely keen to represent the data as a globe that the user could spin around themselves. We knew that until we actually started experimenting with the data and the visuals that we just couldn’t be so conceptually ‘nailed down’ just yet. To their (and the BMB producer Tyrone’s) credit they allowed us to be pretty non-specific with how we were going to display the map at this stage. We entered our prototyping phase with gusto, knowing that the team were in for some serious experimentation!
Any period of prototyping needs to have some clear questions to answer. We had three:
a) What was the infographic world going to look like? Was it to be a globe, a flat map, a 3/4 view?
b) How would we represent the changing HDI value? By colour? By the size of countries? By height or behaviour?
c) How far could we push the tech spec? A world map, with all of the country borders etc has hundreds of edges. If we are doing something in 3D how was Flash going to handle all of the interpretation of the data on the fly and then rendering it as 3d values. Should we use Papervision? Away 3D? Should we use 3D models from 3DStudio Max? What could we get away with before it fell over?
We finished our ‘Think’ stage of the project knowing that we had only planned the project in terms of the objectives and the potential of the raw data. Now… looking at the project from outside eyes, this might sound a bit irresponsible and lacking in “traditional” planning techniques, after all it might appear that we had simply created a list of questions based around look and feel, style and technical possibilities. We felt though that we had now fleshed out exactly what the website needed to communicate and we were now in an extremely good place – our Design stage was ready to go.
In my next blog post I will describe how we prototyped and started working out a visual style for the infographic.