jennybee.net

I produced the News Sauce website displaying sector-specific news and media, launching with content from UK government departments.

I project managed the entire delivery from conception to launch.

Brainstormed and documented service requirements, conceptualised layout and design, commissioned technical solution, briefed and managed designer and developer to deliver iterations to a final launch candidate.

I also set up an associated twitter channel, commissioned website copy implementing SEO techniques and carry out ongoing monitoring of Google Analytics to inspire recommendations for future development of the product.

Greenbelt is an arts festival that takes place every August bank holiday weekend.

For the last three years I have been team leader of the media capture team. The team’s objective is to capture video content and upload it to the web throughout the festival.

My role is to be ultimately responsible for the team, conceive visual and editorial approach, brief producers and editors and oversee the output throughout the festival.

I’m also responsible for team management and on-site logistics, ensuring smooth running and that footage is uploaded to the web with appropriate labels and tags on-demand throughout the duration of the festival.

The team is made up of around thirty people, including producers, camera operators, editors, interviewers, floor manager, vision mixers.

Part of my role is also to make contact and liaise with VIPs and Greenbelt contributors on-site.

The output from the team has dramatically increased over the years and features politicians, bishops, musicians, oscar winners, poets, comedians and the occasional bit of mud.

You can see all the videos produced by the media capture team at www.vimeo.com/greenbelt.

In June 2009 I was approached to participate in an extensive research and development project for the BBC.

The brief was to identify tools and services to improve usability and engagement of the Religion and Ethics section of the BBC website.

Working alongside Matt Patterson (Constituent Parts) we carried out interviews with potential and existing users of the web site to gain insight and recommended a number of tools that the BBC should consider developing.

In March 2010 BBC commissioned a prototype of one of those tools – a multi-faith calendar.

The brief

To develop a prototype of a proposed multi-faith calendar based on the initial R&D project.

My role

My role was to conceptualise the product, define the user experience, develop wireframes and provide direction to the visual designer. I was working in a team of 5 consisting of developers, usability designer and visual designer.

First ideas

We knew the calendar needed to consist of 2 axis, width and depth. Width in the sense that we needed to show events (festivals, feast days, prayer times) spanning a year, and depth in that each event needed to be ‘drilled into’ for detailed information.

We began by researching calendaring tools from across the ages and across the world with a trip to the British Museum.

The visit provided the inspiration that the calendar needed to feel 3D in nature and using it should be almost a tactile (although screen-based) experience.

A 3D calendar

We settled on the notion of a ‘drum’ that could scroll both vertically and horizontally.

The default view would show one entire year with religions appearing stacked in rows around the drum. Festivals, feast days and prayer times would be represented on the drum in terms of the number of days or amount of time they spanned.

Personas

I developed a set of 6 personas to enable us to test scenarios

The personas enabled us to conceive some user journies and test concepts throughout the design process.

Detail views

The tool needed to support various levels of interaction. It needed to have value for a person skimming content to see how different religious festivals related to one another on the time line. It needed to help people research information about religions and religious festivals. It also needed to have a practical application in notifying people when to pray on a daily basis.

In order to satisfy these key requirements of the brief, it needed to be possible to be able to drill down to discover details about each item on the calendar.

We identified key ‘zoom levels’ at which different amounts of detail would be available.

Design iterations

I worked alongside the visual designer on iterations of wireframes followed by polished designs.

Refining designs as they were tested against the personas and the original brief.

The final product

We built a fully functional prototype using real content from BBC website.

The Ministry of Justice needed to revamp their Governance of Britain website to coincide with a renewed public debate entitled ‘People, Power & Politics’.

I was asked to update the design of the existing WordPress website and add social media tools to enable conversation with interested parties.

My role in the project was two-fold. I produced an updated design and wordpress templates for the website. I also advised the team on how to use social media to encourage debate and conversation.

In July 2008 I was asked to help the Ministry of Justice press office get to grips with monitoring online news content.

Up to that point, monitoring consisted of manually monitoring news sources, primarily using major news outlets, plus a small number of keyword searches. This was time consuming, inefficient and not revealing the full picture.

Fortunately there are free web tools that could be harnessed to make the monitoring process more productive and useful.

In order to improve access to web content, and to make the best use of the tools available, the solution needed to:

1. offer real time alerting of breaking news;
2. enable the categorisation of content for ease of use;
3. allow for the sharing of content of interest amongst the news desk;
4. allow for the sharing of content amongst the wider press office;
5. be simple to use and not burden people with additional work.

The solution

We configured an iGoogle page (the ‘dashboard’) to display content from a Google Reader account. Google Reader offers categorisation and the sharing of content and iGoogle supplies a simple interface; key requirements for the solution.

Setting up the dashboard

We began by subscribing through Google Reader to a number of keyword search results from news.google.com. We set it to search UK news sources only and omitted certain keywords to tailor results (e.g., “court” -tennis).

The keywords were decided upon through consultation with the news desk team and trial and error.

The feeds were grouped by business area and placed in appropriate folders in Google Reader. Additional feeds for Ministers names and a generic corporate one were also set up.

The content of the folders that contain the feeds were then displayed in a series of ‘gadgets’ on the dashboard.

Starring items

The press officer monitoring the dashboard is able to highlight items of interest by ‘starring’ them. This is basic Google Reader functionality that is available in the iGoogle gadget used to display the feeds.

Starred items appear in a separate gadget on the dashboard for quick reference. A list of the days starred items is also emailed (using Feedburner) to news desk members and other staff at the end of each day.

Was it a success?

Feedback from news desk press officers has been wholly positive. In addition to answering the requirements set out at the start of the projects, the dashboard has enabled:

• monitoring of regional news sources that don’t feature in daily cuts;
• easier observation of how press notices are interpreted by journalists;
• ability to spot inaccurate stories and rebut within a very short space of time.

Challenges & future developments

Dashboards present a huge opportunity for monitoring for business areas such as strategic communications, private office and policy teams, in addition to press offices as they can be tailored to meet specific requirements.

Please get in touch if you would like to chat about how you can use monitoring dashboards in your organisation.

I caught up with the Amplified team at Civil Service Live recently and got interviewed by the lovely (and uber-talented) Steve Lawson about the work I’ve been doing on Monitoring Dashboards at Ministry of Justice (amongst other things).

And so the wonderful twitter updates from MarsPhoenix have come to an end.

The Mars lander sent her last message on 10 November with the binary for ‘triumph’:

01010100 01110010 01101001 01110101 01101101 01110000 01101000 http://twitter.com/MarsPhoenix/status/999383469

I can’t help feeling a little sad.

The tone of the updates generated a genuine relationship between the lander and her followers. Her tweets were – in the truest sense of the word – delightful.

Using Twitter in this way was inspired. The audience was ideal and the tweets were perfectly pitched to be informative, geeky, funny and often very cute.

As I tweeted when I first started following her:

I HEART the @MarsPhoenix tweets.. imagining a little wide eyed robot scurrying over the surface pointing, jumping and squealing with glee
http://twitter.com/jennybee/statuses/827012873

Read more about the mission and the social media strategy here: Mars Phoenix Lander Runs Out of Juice.

Oh and in case you were wondering; ‘veni, vidi, fodi’ means ‘I came, I saw, I dug’.

I finally got round to reading that Wired article that everyone’s been talking about. The one where they said:

Thinking about launching your own blog? Here’s some friendly advice: Don’t. And if you’ve already got one, pull the plug.

And I agree. Sort of.

What the article identified is a shift towards seeing the web as offering myriad ways to communicate and participate.

I enjoy reading blogs and I like having the opportunity to comment. But for most of the blogs that I read, their authors also have a Twitter stream, their photos are on Flickr, they stream video to Qik (amongst other things). And this content is becoming more valuable to me than the stuff on their blogs. It’s valuable because it’s instant and it allows me to participate in a conversation much more easily.

Platforms

I was wondering the other day why it is I don’t religiously scan my Google Reader subscriptions every lunchtime anymore (see?). And I’ve come to realise it’s partly because I’m already getting updates and ideas and comments from the bloggers I’m subscribed to from their other web activity.

This is not to say that blogging is dead but we’re in an age of platforms now. Where we are no longer identified by our blog but by the sum of our web activity. It’s what FriendFeed attempts to facilitate – although it’s worth noting that the way FriendFeed is designed can make an entire feed of one person’s web activity appear overwhelming.

For me, I feel a redesign of this blog coming on to truly reflect my web activities on the platforms I currently describe as ‘Social habits’.

I love the old school futurism of this poem:

16-bit Intel 8088 chip by Charles Bukowski

with an Apple Macintosh
you can’t run Radio Shack programs
in its disc drive.
nor can a Commodore 64
drive read a file
you have created on an
IBM Personal Computer.
five one dot five one zero five
both Kaypro and Osborne computers use
the CP/M operating system
but can’t read each other’s
handwriting
for they format (write
on) discs in different
ways.
minus zero dot one two five one four one
the Tandy 2000 runs MS-DOS but
can’t use most programs produced for
the IBM Personal Computer
unless certain
bits and bytes are
altered
but the wind still blows over
Savannah
and in the Spring
the turkey buzzard struts and
flounces before his
hens.

Confused? This should help you out.

I’m full of love for the web at the moment.

Well, I’m always full of love for the web, but every now and then my tolerance for navel gazing disappears completely and this time it’s been replaced by a desire to just sit back and enjoy for a while.

Bathcamp is a matter of weeks away and I’ve been mulling over what I might contribute. Whatever it ends up being, it’ll be a celebration. Pure and simple. And preferably without any explanation or discussion.

I might host a film club – bring a clip from your favourite video sharing site. Or perhaps the same thing but bring a film, a flickr photo, a (demonstrable) meme or a website.

In case you were wondering: today my 3 favourite things on the internet are:

Urinal Bitchie – Hello (because of the entire spectrum of wrongness)

The 21 Steps google maps story (because of the potential it represents)

The sneezing lamppost (bless you)

Tell you what, while we’re on the subject, what’s your best thing on the web, reader? Post me a comment…

I also like the idea of actually making stuff during the weekend. Something creative, not just your standard documentation of conferences guff (handy though that is ). So that’s something else to ponder.

If you’re coming to Bathcamp, keep an eye on the wiki to find out what I come up with (in case you need to bring anything!).

If you weren’t planning on coming to Bathcamp, I’d strongly recommend reconsidering. And – hurrah – there are still a few tickets available!