The quarterly publication of the International Legal Technology Association
Issue link: https://epubs.iltanet.org/i/67910
lessons learned support the review of development sprints, content migration and user testing. Creative Design One of the most exciting parts of the project was seeing the website come to life through the creative design process. We wanted to convey to our audience: • That we are a leading, world-class international law firm • The brand values of the firm, our people and culture • That we are forward-thinking and innovative • That we are experienced and trusted advisers in the sectors in which we operate Designing by committee is always difficult because design (and usability) is subjective. Each of us had a perspective on what we wanted to see in the new site, and the early concepts produced were actually very close to the design that we settled on. That was a real credit to the creative designer. When talking to our lawyers and clients about the new site, feedback has commonly centered on the simplicity of the design and its ease of use. Our project team is proud of this accomplishment, and we are very appreciative of the support we received from our development partner during this process. Agile Development Like many Web development projects, we followed a mix of waterfall and agile methodologies in different phases of the project. We followed an agile methodology during development, producing four sprints in relatively quick succession. The first of the sprints was quite a large build (probably much bigger than you would ordinarily see). Sprint one gave us the website foundation, including: • The first series of content templates • Various common panels and facets • Basic content management and administration • Core functionality, such as user registration and multiple languages Sprint one was therefore the largest of the four, and other aspects of the site depended on it. Each subsequent sprint added additional (and richer) site functionality. By the time we had completed the third sprint, we had a stable site in which we felt confident that we could commence the process of migrating content from the old system. Testing It took time and attention to detail to review each of the sprints 132 Peer to Peer from a functional and usability perspective. This is one of the areas where we used the Australia to London time zone difference to our advantage — we reviewed work during London business hours and handed things over to Sydney, and updates were ready for us the following morning. Although routine morning calls were sometimes onerous, this aspect of the project worked well, allowing us to move at a good pace and stay on track with other day-to-day tasks. As with the functional specification, the more time you can invest in testing, the better your system will be. We tested across platforms and browsers, making sure the site behaved well with IE, Safari, Firefox and Google Chrome. Looking back, getting functions and features to operate under IE was consistently more difficult than in the other browsers. We had to make aspects of the site backward-compatible (e.g., video), where we built to support HTML5 and provided backward compatibility with Flash for older browsers. Overall, we invested hundreds of hours in testing the various sprints and giving meticulous (some might say overly meticulous) feedback to the development team. Our attention to detail, thorough testing and feedback paid off however, as we anticipated many problems early, dealing with them weeks before we were scheduled to go live. Content and User Migration A significant part of the project involved the automated migration of around 7,000 articles and newsletters, and the manual migration of microsites, training resources and video podcasts. We formed the view that we could automate the migration of routine resources, and that it was worth the time and effort to rebuild the more specialized areas. We had previously been using a number of different video hosting providers (a different provider for the online training videos and another for the weekly video podcasts that were integrated with iTunes). As part of the rebuild, we wanted to standardize how our videos were managed (moving to MP4 from WMV), and we wanted to manage the assets in one place. We had to completely rebuild and upload content for our subscription-based online services. This required an extreme attention to detail because clients pay for the service and rely on the information contained in the services to inform management decisions. Agreeing to a process and then migrating the 20,000+ elexica subscribers was a logistical exercise in itself. Our objective was to make it easy for our clients and contacts to seamlessly revalidate their elexica accounts in the new system (hopefully in one click, with minimal additional details required). We culled our subscriber database prior to migrating user accounts, ensuring that invalid email addresses (accounts where we had bounce-backs) were excluded. We also decided we would not automatically migrate an elexica subscriber who had not logged in during the last two years. Our user migration covered around 11,000 "active" users.