Si Jobling

As should become tradition every year, it’s time to reflect on the last 12 months, highlighting the good, bad and pivotal points.

The year started with the final stages of Free Tunes for Christmas – a seasonal music site offering a free dance track for the 12 days of Christmas. Amongst the targeted audience, this was a huge success proving the age old tradition that free giveaways are a desirable product. One element of the project I didn’t factor for was the amount of time and resources required to compile the content. Oliver Ker did a fantastic job on design and build of the site but the hardest part was confirming musical partners and scheduling releases in a timely manner. If I ever run the campaign again, this will definitely be an area I’ll allow more time.

Professionally, I’ve achieved a significant number of milestones at Premium Choice, unfortunately more prominent internally.

I’ve led development of a powerful CRM tool having introduced an Agile project lifecycle, adapting to the rapid growth and changes of business requirements. We have received much praise from the board and staff, even external partners for the business intelligence the application delivers so the project has been a massive success for the company and I have taken great pride from it too.

I’ve also managed the development of our Buy Online strategy, tailoring the user journey from price comparison sites to final purchase. This has been addressed in a phased approach to ensure we focus on fundamental processes in manageable chunks. All partners involved admire the work and effort gone into the first phase so it bodes well for the next.

We also introduced the first stage of our niche mini-site strategy by creating and delivering a tailored site for motor trade insurance. Whilst it’s still early days to thoroughly evaluate performance, first impressions are good and all partners feel confident the strategy will be an effective approach for the business.

Towards the end of the Summer, I teamed up with Daniel Newns and launched another spin-off sport calendar app for the Rugby World Cup in South Africa. With less commercial appeal than the football world cup, I wasn’t expecting record traffic but it scratched an itch, especially when I live in the home of rugby football, and certainly proved popular amongst the fans of the game.

In November, I teamed up with Sam Hardacre and Anthony Killeen to build Tweets for Balls – a digital fundraising campaign for testicular cancer. We piggybacked available tools such as Giv2.it, Just Giving and Twitter to raise awareness and money for cancer research, followed by endless multi-channel promotion throughout the month. On hindsight, it wasn’t a great idea to compete with the popular Movember campaign as we struggled to reach our goal of £1,000 but it was still a good opportunity to work with some people I’ve admired for years as well as create something charitable. I’m keen to try again next year but focus more on marketing and viral campaigns now the foundations are set.

Tweets for Balls was also an ideal opportunity to venture into public speaking. When I co-found Midlands creative network The Multipack way back in 2005, I’ve always been keen to leverage (sorry!) the platform by building my confidence and find my voice. When we held a Show & Tell in November at Birmingham Science Park, it felt like my calling to give it a try. It was by no means groundbreaking but I’m glad I tried and feedback wasn’t negative. Read what you will into that but I’m taking light in it.

Throughout the year, I’ve continued to produce, broadcast and syndicate my house music mix show Funky House Finesse. It’s built quite a loyal fan base over the past 6 years so the biggest highlight for me was reaching the milestone of 800 Facebook fans in October. That count is continually growing so maybe – just maybe – we’ll reach 1,000 in 2012.

Anyone who knows me should also know I’m an avid Twitter user. Several years ago, I registered the @derbycounty account to accompany my Super Rams fan site. It didn’t get much use but follower counts increased with the popularity of Twitter. Earlier this year, I asked fellow Ram Franca Hood if she wanted to live commentate from the matches which she jumped at. And, didn’t she do well. It wasn’t long before 3,000 more followed and this continues to grow. I really feel there is a tangible opportunity with this model, giving committed fans a platform to engage with real people with similar passions.

All in all, 2011 has been quite a successful year. I’ve accomplished a number of personal goals but equally seen some less successful moments. As always, I’ll take note from those errors to find ways to improve but I’ve got a good feeling about 2012. Here’s hoping.

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Working against the clock is normally discouraged, especially when you have more than enough work on at the time. However, I often find tight deadlines are an ideal opportunity to test the old grey matter, push my abilities to the limit and, strangely, motivate me to try harder.

A classic example of this was building Rugby World Cup KickOff.

It was only after driving past our local Rugby School (the founding home of the sport) that I realised the Rugby World Cup was fast approaching. I had originally planned to cover the event with the usual KickOff calendar download app earlier in the year but other projects and clients took priority. That didn’t phase me though. I had a working framework to reuse so development time was minimal.

That said, I drafted in some support from local developer Daniel Newns to help build some new features while I worked on a new design.

Improving the UI

I was actually quite happy with the existing design and layout of World Cup KickOff from last year. The user interface focussed on the core functionality and information architecture seemed ideal.

The main change I wanted to make was extra emphasis on the actual kickoff time as a large amount of traffic to the other calendar websites showed visitors searching for just that. I also realised very few users were filtering events by date so decided to remove that option.

With regards to the general style, I wanted to keep the style minimal, avoiding typical cliché trends found online yet maintain the simple, retro style established on World Cup KickOff.

Equally, there had to be some reference to the competition host of New Zealand. With the country’s squad known as the “All Blacks”, this lent naturally towards the monochrome colour scheme. Whilst the style may feel somewhat flat, almost like a lo-fi wireframe, it allowed me to focus purely on the content and functionality without too much distraction. I can imagine some designers questioning the design decision but, hey, you can’t please everyone.

Web Typography

On recent projects, I’ve not had the opportunity to experiment with web fonts much so I decided this was an ideal situation.

There are a number of web font providers available such as Typekit and Fontdeck, but I decided to give Google Web Fonts a try taking into consideration costs and service availability.

After testing some font combinations, I decided on Francois One and Gentium Basic. The strength and weighting of Francois One represented the personality of rugby as a sport quite well, while the elegance of Gentium Basic reflected the traditional history of the game.

Release Early, Release Often

I’ve recently changed my approach to development by releasing early and releasing often. When I discussed the project with Dan early on, we had some great ideas to improve the service with additional features.

That said, with time against us, I decided to launch the service as early as possible with the basic functionality, enhancing the user experience in a phased approach.

Working like this, we can adapt the roadmap according to user demand. We’re monitoring the website traffic using services like GoSquared LiveStats,Google Analytics and Facebook Insights so we have a good idea of what visitors are looking at and for.

To help manage the project, I started using a few self-hosted open source solutions:

• Project Pier is a fantastic application for managing tasks, tickets, resources and clients. I’ve started using it with a few client and personal projects and found it perfect for collaborating on Rugby World Cup KickOff
• Web SVN is a neat little PHP app which allows you to keep track of Subversion repositories. You can even subscribe to updates via RSS which I’ve plugged into Growl with RSS Growler for desktop notifications.

We plan to roll out some Twitter integration shortly after launch as well as some extra content on the main website.

The Next Step

Sport events are social occasions. They unite people together in a common interest and these people tend to have a lot to say on the matter. This is a perfect time to tap into social media.

Twitter has fast become the key communication tool of the internet, bypassing the “walled garden” of Facebook, allowing individuals to have a say in the public forum with ease.

With this in mind, I’m keen to harness the power of Twitter and sport events. The KickOff project has always been about embracing technology with sporting events, originally based on the ICS calendar format but since pushing the boundaries to other media formats.

The next natural step for the project is to embrace the community, allowing individuals to share their experience of an event, both online and offline.

We’ll be experimenting with the Rugby World Cup and Twitter over the next few weeks and, going forward, a few more major sport events such as next year’s big event, Olympics 2012 in London (although we have a few hurdles to jump – pardon the pun – regarding event publication).

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The other week, I kicked off my Design Tour of The Midlands with a visit to The Higgs Design Co.

Founded by Andy Higgs in 2006, the studio has quickly gathered a reputable group of clients, ranging from successful local startups to International suppliers.

The Higgs Design Co pride themselves on creating “considered web application and design work” with a heavy emphasis on providing the ultimate user experience, advising customers on how best to achieve this. There are too many studios in the industry who are “Yes Men”, simply ticking the boxes of client’s requirements but The Higgs Design Co aim to address that head on by working with customers to think about what it is their customers actually want. Ultimately, they like to work with businesses to grow them, online and offline.

This practise is evident from their recent work with Urban Coffee Co in Birmingham.

The small coffee shop in the centre of Birmingham is popular amongst the creative community so The Higgs Design Co advised Urban Coffee Co how to best utilise social media to grow their brand online. As part of a redesign, Higgs made sure social media was at the centre of the Urban Coffee Co experience, using services like Foursquare and Twitter to communicate with their audience.

Going forward, Higgs are now working on the ecommerce element of the Urban Coffee Co website, allowing customers to purchase their renowned coffee as well as giving the business an opportunity to extend their reach outside of Birmingham City Centre.

Higgs are also currently working on a complete redesign of UK startup Rate My Placement which Andy has been heavily involved in from the start.

Back in 2006, three (bored) students on placement from Loughborough University realised there wasn’t enough information out there for universities to assist placement students so they set out to resolve this.

Fast forward five years and the small startup is now a team of 15 with the goal of reorienting the product to a web application with more emphasis on the user, expecting to be launched in late part of 2011.

The Higgs Design Co are also working closely with a number of other clients, including the world’s most prestiges rose suppliers David Austin Roses and racing driver Adam Christodoulou.

Design In The Midlands

I was keen to find out what Andy thought of the Midlands’ creative scene, why the area tends to get overlooked in the Web sphere.

His initial reaction was that many people in the region don’t tend to shout about what they do, the good things don’t get talked about.

As a whole, people in the Midlands are quite self-deprecating – it seems to be one of our many qualms and we don’t defend the area when outsiders say “it’s shit”. In a recent article by the Independent, Birmingham – the UK’s “second city” – was classed as a third-rate city, which says a lot about the general consensus of the public, compared to people in Manchester and Liverpool who claim London as the “second city”.

Another fault seems to show that the city is divided. For example, two of Birmingham’s main creative hubs, the Jewellery Quarter and Digbeth, have specific boundaries with little crossover in their communities, yet both have creatively strong communities.

Birmingham is generating a lot of talent, through the many universities and colleges, so there should be plenty of opportunity for growth.

The best approach to dealing with the creative silence is to continue developing local businesses, but making more noise about what we do, channeling the enthusiasm into public voice.

The Grid Challenge

I was keen to make the most of the trip to The Higgs Design Co so took a design challenge for them.

I’m currently working on an internal CRM solution for Premium Choice and I’ve got to a situation where users like a full screen “liquid” UI yet there are obvious barriers with designing such interfaces, especially with standardised grids, so I’m keen to push a fixed grid.

Both solutions have their pitfalls so we discussed the differences between fixed, liquid and responsive grids.

In the end, responsive seemed like the most suitable approach to cover the numerous use cases, such as operational users on 1024×768 resolutions, management on wider resolutions and the potential to introduce smaller designs for portable devices such as iPads.

As part of this, Andy suggested a 16px baseline which he has used on a number of previous projects as it is relatively easy to remember multiples using typical computer bit rates.

To make the grid even more flexible, we introduced a naming convention for adopting columns with different amount of units:

• 3 column layout (33% and 67%)
• 2 column layout (50/50)

The new system also allows for an optional 16px padding to a column, reducing the column width to avoid broken columns. See the sample document for some example use cases.

Summary

Considering The Higgs Design Co have only been in the creative hub of Birmingham’s Jewellery Quarter since February, the future of the company is looking pretty solid for the near future. Expect to see a lot more from these guys over the coming years.

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