REDESIGN LESSONS LEARNED

Share your top 1-3 Wins and Challenges:

Project Wins: What went well--so we can continue to capitalize on them.

Project Challenges: What can be improved--so we can learn from them, solve for/discuss changes, and prevent them in the future.

WHAT WENT WELL?

What do you want to celebrate about this project?

What were the WOW moments?

What groups worked together well and why?

What should we leverage from this project for the next?

What did we learn by doing this project?

How successful were we at planning/documenting/communicating during implementation?

WHAT DO WE WANT TO DO BETTER?

Where could we improve?

What things surprised us that weren't in our plan?

What interdependencies did we miss?

What should we simplify/automate?

GUIDANCE

Focus on what will help improve projects and our working relationships in the future. 

Try to be diplomatic and focused on the spirit of evolving, learning and sharing to continously improve our ways of working together (or with outside vendors)

Be positive.

Don't place blame.

Focus on successes as well as failures.

CONSIDERATIONS

Project Scale and Complexity.

Project Timeline.

WINS

Creative Services was a great partner helping to solve for and turning around new images quickly and with a can-do attitude. 

We did a great job of involving most teams (creative, development, business, marketing, content) into the brainstorming and wireframing process for the site. It allowed us to take the best features of the legacy site, while creating room for distinguishing product lines, other brands, and our science team. 

Incorporated copy review with MSC early and with enough time allotted for review process in timeline.

Content team did a good job of responding to content gaps that were discovered during development.

Developing site via templates and modules; transitioning to Github repository.

Continuing to Use ACF to maintain our store data, which gives content and business teams a way to manage the site, without changing the theme/code. 

ACF (accentuate custom fields) is easy for CMS.

Workfront is good for QC issue creation and tracking.

CHALLENGES 

Preview the UI/UX design before deliver.

The "rapid prototyping" approach was intended to speed up the timeline and make development more efficient, but it seemed to make things more complicated; it was challenging to get a sense of site flow.

A lot of documentation/ training for the business team on how to manage the site (change authors, add related blogs, and more were done after the site launch). It would be nice to prep all teams on how to manage the site based on new changes before a big site launch.

Too much email back and forth, and things got lost in translation.

Even though content was identified upfront, we still uncovered gaps, from headers to full pages. 

Planning a photo shoot dedicated to the redesign would have allowed for a greater focus + more lead time to frontload the perfect images for the project. 

Scrambling behind the scenes. 

LEARNINGS 

Stick to Prototype plan (Strategy went sideways when execution was changed: plan was to review all templates were in first prototype session, including top 5 priority; instead prototype session were spread out and not in priority order).

Stick to 'waterfall' implementation.

Project stages where training and functionality can be discussed:

• SOW

• Requirements

• Prototype Sessions

• Post-Launch

Implementation and bug trackers were implemented later on which was easier to track changes, but things would have been more organized if done sooner.

Use shared docs to communicate/track overall summary of priorities, tasks, ownership, high-level comments/references.

Create a living document/checklist of elements need to stand up a page e.g. for pdp, collections, HP, blogs to ensure all info captured and updated.

Utilize Site Map and/or detail Site Map out further to help identify.

Website Taxonomy in progress.

Consider elements needed for the site, must-haves and nice to haves. 

Identify Creative Services needs earlier in the process.

Training with business/DTC teams on new systems before launching them.

Build-in sufficient time for MSC review, and as early in project timeine as is feasible.

Identify all content areas upfront, prior to development.

Continue to seek out ways in which we can work smarter and be more scalable.

With design deliverables, we only need a workable Sketch file which allows us to export all the graphics we need and find all the style guidelines such as margins, paddings, and font size/color/weight/face. Sliced images are not necessary. 

Grant InVision Inspect access (</>) to Development team. 

Internal detailed RACI for ownership.