In this second of two posts on campaign landing pages (read part one), Josh Morris (Senior Front End Developer) and Jamie Forsyth (UX/UI Designer) discuss using a sprint approach to create campaign landing pages at the University.
We brought together experts to work in a ‘sprint style’ fashion over three weeks, aiming to deliver campaign landing pages that could be built and maintained within our institutional content management system (CMS), TerminalFour Site Manager.
Our experts included marketers, external agencies, product managers, content designers, user interface/experience designers, developers and other stakeholders.
The sprint approach
For this project, our ‘sprint style’ process looked like this:
- Pre-sprint informal talks, assessing the scope of the project.
- Start of sprint kick-off with all stakeholders, to create a sprint plan and review user needs.
- 15-minute daily catch-ups, to evaluate progress and blockers.
- Design mini-sprint, designing the most useful ‘blocks’ to be usable, accessible, aesthetically-pleasing and most importantly helping the user achieve their goals.
- Development mini-sprint, turning the designs into web pages.
- User testing and interview preparation (the actual user tests and interviews took place post-sprint and informed ongoing improvements).
- Acceptance testing of the pages with UX Design and Content teams.
This new way of working for us did give us a few bumps in the road. In particular, we needed to make design changes mid-sprint, which had a knock-on impact on other groups.
Reviewing and refining our approach
As part of our retrospective, we’ve decided that future projects could run separate design and development sprints. We also found that those who were new to the process sometimes felt they could only attend our 15 minute stand up sessions if they had updates.
We aim to address this by explaining the process at the beginning of projects and changing stand-ups to only require the core delivery team, with optional attendance from others.
It’s great that the team are really open to refining our approach and intend to pivot to a more strategic way of working with each project.
Has our approach worked?
Overall, the sprint was a great success. Not only did it deliver user tested reusable ‘blocks’ that are now available to use in our CMS, it also built a real buzz and an unexpected camaraderie around the project, with all involved having a sense of ownership of the result.
Post-sprint, we continue to refine the blocks (which is super quick, using our new Design System – more on that soon). We are now looking at ways to communicate to the rest of the University how they can best utilise what’s been created in a way that is focused on the goals of both the users and the University.
Contact us
If you’d like to explore how the Digital Experience team can support you on a project you’re planning or working on, fill in our digital projects support request form (University of Bristol only).