The document discusses improving collaboration between designers, developers, and content strategists. It provides tips for finding common ground, learning each other's skills, experimenting with timing, and refusing to be treated as an afterthought to better work as a multidisciplinary team. The future is viewed as multidisciplinary where all are seen as creative problem solvers.
How this talk came about \nKnow that they are on to you?\n
First tip\n
Marry Geek \n
How I learned\n
Working with agencies\n
Multidisciplinary is the future\n
Talk about the elephant in the room \n
Designer\n
shirt\n
ironic t-shirt\n
Skinny jeans\n
Thick glasses\n
Unhealthy obsession with helvetica\n
Developer\n
Conference tshirt\n
Beard (unless a woman)\n
Baggy jeans\n
Slightly pasty skin\n
unhealthy obsession generally\n
Okay, you can recognise that this are comedy generalisations\n
Content strategy -> spreadsheets \n
Design work -> brain-bending maths\n
Development -> creative problem solving\n
Triforce of content + design + development = creative web\n
Creative problem solvers\n
Too many cooks\n
True story from working at agency 2 years ago\n
Content person goes to agency \n
Project Manager briefs her, mostly stressing the budget is just three days work\n
Designer proudly shows off his design and points out the boxes he’s left for her\n
The developer sits hiding in the corner\n
Team meeting - developer not there\n
Designer spent the time choosing typefaces\n
IA all land grabby\n
Client dials in and says he wants the project to ‘sound like a social network’. We all shout huzzah. And weep.\n
Content person goes and hides in the toilet and checks her contract\n
Agencies have worked out that UX means paying attention to the content\n
Actually, battle isn’t 100% won but others here will talk about that\n
The question is: what next?\n“shut up about it and now do it” from keynote.\n
Danger of creating our own pitfall for content\n
Agencies are hungry lions\n
Danger of becoming a commodity\n
Content needs to be in the thick of it...\n
...With the Designers\n
...With the Developers\n
...With the IAs and PMs and directors and usability consultants.\n
Content is not just an amorphous blob\n\n
We need to be there during the creation of sites\n
No-one add would add ‘developed site’ to list without talking to a developer\n
Developer is a person to that agency, and he usually works for them or closely with them\n
You are not just an outcome.\n
What’s the first step?\n
Make friends with web teams, get in amongst them\nGo to conferences\nAttend bar camps\nInfilitrate their camps generally\n
I’ve worked with 8 agencies in the last 2 years\n
A ragbag of ideas\n
Your Mileage May Vary\n
Find common ground\n
Alien beast\n
Seek out problems to solve\n
Microcopy\n
Work together, side by side, discipline with discipline\nSuggest things you can bring to the project\n
Learn the Lingua Franca\n
Not just alien beast, also alien language\n
Deployment, Staging, Tracking, and other funny words\nAlpha gov\n
Varnishing cucumbers with puppets.\n
Teach new words in return\nstyle guide is a pattern library at fb\nIt was an asset library at alphagov and shared on the same wiki as the design assets and code assets\n\n
Show your skills\n
Written notes\n
Piles of written notes\n
Even more written notes\n
Designer/Developer high five\n
Content not part of the high five. \nBe part of that documentation.\n
\n
Show your workings\n
Then point out your workings to the world\nAdd a rationale section\nPush back on assumptions too\n\n
Project management: how my budget quadrupled overnight\n
Ask others to show you their work too\n\n
Add to that work\n
Divvy up tasks (especially with IA)\n
Be sensitive about others’ efforts, especially designers / developers stuck with copy\n
Experiment with the timing\n
I struggle with judging expectations of time to create content\n
Devs have computer power\n
We have ... brain power.\n
This does not scale as well\n
Agile sprints. push back in the sprint if you can. negotiate length of time. trad agile is v.dev focused - need common ground.\n
Waterfall - larger margin for error that a simple search, replace and debug doesn’t do. Very isolating for content - primarily used for pushing the site from silo to silo.\n
Sneaky: the copy and paste trick. As are audits.\nI mean educational and character building.\nAnd non-negotiable.\n
Refuse to be tacked on at the end.\nMental toughness.\n
Sit at the table\nSheryl Sandberg\nFacebook COO\n
Catching up costs time and money\n
\nActively look to make a difference early on to prove it was worth having you in. Don’t coast. Contribute.\n
Don’t let others be left out either\n
A multidisciplinary team needs multi disciplines looking it over\n
Someone missing always knows something vital\n
Relly’s world tour aka, telling web teams what’s coming\n
We are a nice bunch\n
We might need to be a bit less nice\n
‘Why are you doing it that way round’\n