Hi Todd: I've seen many projects like this one, and there are some good patterns I bet I and others can share.
But first: the big thing you didn't include is what the goals are. You've mentioned a series of constraints, but not the goals. A redesign can mean 50 different things. As long as everyone understands that making big improvements will be more difficult with the constraints you've mentioned, then you can still be set up to succeed. But if everyone is expecting the world, and they don't recognize how challenging the landscape is, you are set up to fail. Step #1 is make sure everyone involved sees the same obstacles before you start moving. * Incentives & disincentives to get others to adopt common standards Adopting standards is work, and boring work. The standard tricks are: 1) Make it brain dead easy to adopt the standards. 2) Volunteer to do the work for high visibility areas yourself 3) Get a high profile part of the site to do it and use them as your poster child (Be like Mike!) or 4) Get the people in power to put rewards in place for those who make the move. 5) Tie the standards to other goals that already exist in the organization. All of the above can work in conjunction. And of course a bug-bash type pizza party or some social event can work, if you can pull of the cool/snarky mix necessary to make it work given the orgs culture. * Strategies to achieve buy in Be credible. Be patient. Deliver. It takes way longer than everyone thinks to earn credibility. If you're good, be patient and you'll earn it. If you're in a rush, pick the key people whose trust is most valuable and ask them, flat out, one on one, for their buy in. Say "What do I need to do to get your full support for my proposal?" And then kick-ass at whatever it is they say they need you to do. When you get the support of even one key person, everything else gets easier. They become leverage to help sell your ideas and requests to the rest of the organization. Bet heavy on single individuals with heavy influence, who happen to be most open to what you're doing. The big mistake I've seen zillions of designers do is the "present my plan to the whole org at once to get their buy in" which always backfires. You don't get real commitments from people if there are more than 5 people in the room. Start small, build support, and don't do the big show and tell until you can get key people from the team to be presenting passionately *with* you. * Ways to manage expectations about what is covered in the redesign Be up front from day one about what your liabilities are. You have serious constraints that everyone should understand, but they wont get it if you aren't crystal clear. I'd make a list of non-goals - the things some people may assume will happen, but are impossible. Call those out and make sure those assumptions die early. * Heuristics for determining where to draw the scope line A lot of this will be, "it depends." I'd really like to hear "here's what we did, here's what worked, and here's what didn't." Heuristics for this rarely work. And when they do it's with great visual examples, not with a checklist of rules. A better solution is to agree on who the tiebreaking authority is, and you need the people in power to enforce that authority. It could be as simple as "If there is a disagreement about following the guidelines, Todd gets to decide". Or it could be as fancy as a supreme court type deal, where the 5 senior managers of the website get to vote. But there needs to be a system in place where there is one clear editorial voice, or editorial authority. The fear of that authority can help drive people to collaborate such that that authority rarely gets the final say. -Scott -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, July 24, 2008 2:56 PM To: IxDA Subject: [IxDA Discuss] Implementing I/A and web strategy when you don'thave control of the content Hi - I'm working on two similar projects, which are site redesigns of entire web presences. The common factor between both is that we have varying ability to alter or change most of the content--or the I/A it supports. For example, consider redesigning NY Times, but only being able to affect the main page and some personalization features...but not the layout, I/A, or presentation of any section like Health, Finance, etc. Much of this is political, some of it is technical. Some of the content _is_ unique enough to look and operate differently. But my question is this... Does anyone have any thoughts or case studies of a redesign under similar constraints? In particular, I'm interested in: * Incentives & disincentives to get others to adopt common standards * Strategies to achieve buy in * Ways to manage expectations about what is covered in the redesign * Heuristics for determining where to draw the scope line A lot of this will be, "it depends." I'd really like to hear "here's what we did, here's what worked, and here's what didn't." Thanks in advance, Todd ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... 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