Ghosts and the Machine

Getting ready to wrap up another web week here, and once again very little has gone according to plan. But that’s not necessarily bad.

Originally we were going to get our marketing underway this week, but that plan seems to have gotten derailed by some unexpected time consumption in other areas. So if you were looking forward to my first email newsletter, then I think you will still have to wait at least another week.

Here’s what we did get done.

• Office Search – looked at about 8 different sites, mostly around Shanghai Stadium. No clear winner yet, but its clear that we can find an acceptable place in our price range
• New interns — selected a pair of university students to help us part time getting information into our databases. They should start on Wednesday.
• Equipment — ordered some new workstations for those new interns
• Web development — this was the big time consumer. Lots of new tasks on the development of the big site

Planning Rightsite

Now that the site is under construction we are doing daily conference calls with the development team. Here’s the scenario:

• Daily (usually lasts about 60-90 minutes)
• Skype calls (the extra echo adds drama to the scene)
• 8 person development team on their side led by a project manager
• 1 person client team on our side (led by the very capable Mr Ming himself
• Different topics each day as we dig deeper and deeper into the project.

We started on Tuesday talking about the concept of the project, and we have added more focussed discussions since then.

• Tuesday – project concept
• Wednesday — exploration of who the users would be
• Thursday — exploration of search functions and how users would look for information
• Friday — starting to define user roles

Every day has meant sending lists of user characteristics to the developers, checking detailed meeting minutes to make sure that their understanding matches mine, and uncovering lots of things gaps in our understanding of who our users are and what they might want to do with the site.

So now this weekend, in addition to setting up the computers for our new interns, we will be busy mapping out user roles based on the job functions of everyone in our company, and what they will need to do with the site. Of course, since we only have two people in the company right now, most of our workers will still be imaginary. But that’s ok, I find that the imaginary workers don’t ask for raises or complain as often as the real ones

Have a good weekend and see you next week!

Related posts:

1. Paying for My Own Education
2. No Fools Here
3. Mapping Our Web Future
4. Hurdling Through China
5. Living in America