How to manage web projects without setting your hair on fire!

Born in 1989, the web is now an adult but our management practices seem stuck in a youthful time warp best known by the <blink> tag and “Site Best Viewed With” alerts.

It seems like everyone in the organization believes they know what makes a website “work” despite having no design training. Managers insist that “their” pages look or act in ways directly contrary to the rest of the website. Or the web.

What are the unique characteristics of the web that make managing design a challenge? How can we empower stakeholders while also creating a seamless user experience? And how would an iterative, collaborative design process facilitate a responsive web, one where sites work well on phones, tablets and desktops?

 

Presentation

PDF | Slideshare

Resources

Tools

• CrazyEgg
• Inspectlet
• Trello
• Google Analytics
• Google Webmaster Tools

Quoted sources

• Slide 10: Creating a joyful customer journey
• Slide 13: @jrodgers project process diagram
• Slide 16: @MrAlanCooper tweet
• Slide 19: How to create personas your design team will believe in  from @userfocus
  
• Slide 24: Top 10 mistakes of web management
• Slide 26: Avoiding the bottleneck: University and college website navigation from @nonlinear_tweet
• Slide 30: Higher ed 2009 wrapup
• Slide 33: @epersonae tweet
• Slide 42: @webconnoisseur tweet
• Slide 43: @webconnoisseur tweet
• Slide  50: 404 not found
• Slide 54: HealthCare.gov chief resigns
• Slide 55: Why do big IT projects fail so often? from @InformationWeek
• Slide 57: Publication production
• Slide 58: @geek_manager tweet
• Slide 59: @geek_manager tweet
• Slide 64: Giving center stage to customer delight from @designcaffeine
• Slide 65: Question slide from KingCounty webteam internal presentations

 

 

For further reading

Coming!

Speaker bio

Kathy Gill is an industry leader and technologist who still believes in the positive power of this truly disruptive technology we call the web.

Kathy works at the intersection of technology, communication and people. Her work is shaped by the philosophy that communication design should be driven by user-centric thinking not by subjective aesthetics. A human-centered approach to technology such as this is the only way for organizations and people to get results.

She has explored the virtual geography of the World Wide Web since 1993. She masterminded one of the first gubernatorial candidate websites in Washington in 1995 and was intimately involved in the intranet reboot that accompanied the Boeing/McDonnell Douglas merger in 1997. Since 2003, she has taught at the University of Washington.

An early convert to the world of blogging, she has taught classes and led workshops on the subject since 2004 and has presented juried papers on blogging at international conferences in New York, Barcelona and Tokyo. Since 2006, she has been focused on how digital technology has changed the publishing world.

Gill helped create the Web design program at Seattle Central Community College and was an adviser to Lake Washington Technical College as it added a bachelor’s program (and subsequently became Lake Washington Institute of Technology). She has also worked on intranet projects with AT&T Wireless, Microsoft and Safeco. She currently manages the King County Elections website.