I’m excited about this topic. We’ll talk about all aspects. I’m actually interested in looking into ways to train people on how to provide effective feedback. Maybe it’s through a guided set of questions? But, yeah, substance means a lot when you need to act on feedback.

I can’t lie: there was some pre-work. There was a requirements document (which I did not write) that articulated what must be included in the new site. There was also a document that laid out the goals for the week, in generalities.

At the same time, our company’s leadership finalized the new brand and worked with the design team to select a mood board design that could be executed during siteweek. So, that definitely got a lot of the design decisions out of the way. There was still a ton of work to be done…but our team is pretty amazing and collaborative.

I’d say that this is a great start for a new site, if you are brave enough to make yourself redesign in one week. But the project won’t end there. We’re planning for some immediate upgrades and additions. But at least the foundation is there and we’re all happy with what we’ve done so far.

We’re going to follow this project up with a much-needed post mortem meeting. That should bring a lot of the issues to the forefront fro correction if we dare to do it again. But yes, there were some things that lacked just due to time. We worked from a requirements document, but that was altered at times. We documented our IA on whiteboards, but things changed in places. We then missed documentation of those changes, and that affected other pieces of the work. This was certainly a departure from our process, but one that might provide some insight on how we can handle things moving forward on new client work.