Kihlstrom / Kihlström Agile Web

A Challenge to Re-Examine the Methods and Processes Used to Plan, Create An
1. Auflage 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4835-7908-5
Verlag: BookBaby
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 100 Seiten

By tracing the history of software development back to its beginning, this book forces a re-examination of the website design, development and optimization approach that many organizations take for granted. Building upon agile software development and agile marketing practices that are still evolving, author and agency founder Greg Kihlström walks the reader through new ways to look at the way we treat websites, and plan for their redesign and optimization. The life of a website becomes a marathon with incremental improvements over time, instead of a sprint that ends when a new website is created to replace the previous one. Kihlström builds on his experience designing and marketing interactive experiences for top brands, and running an agency since the early 2000s and provides a unique vision for how marketers can create websites that continue to grow in sophistication and effectiveness over time without the need for a continual process of redesigns. This book is aimed at the marketer who wants to create the most effective website possible, and is willing to take a fresh look at how they approach their organization's online presence.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Kihlstrom, Greg

Kihlström, Greg

Leseproben

THE RISE OF MASS PRODUCTION “Mark seven times and cut once” -Benvenuto Cellini, 1563 We’ll get back to websites in a little bit. To return to modernism and the Industrial Age, let’s discuss mass production and assembly line production. Adam Smith first described mass production in 1790, in “the Wealth of Nations,” and it was beginning to take shape in the late 1700s in places such as the gun factory owned by Eli Whitney3 in New Haven, Connecticut. Using a combination of standardisation of process and both skilled and unskilled labor forces, this type of production was possible. Many factors influenced its creation, including growing and concentrated populations, and the relative ease of workforce training required. Mass production also shifted a different type of responsibility onto marketers, in that an entire product could be researched, designed, and created without having ever sold a single example. Instead of selling products made in small quantities, or one-off items, all of a sudden, marketers needed to generate demand and enthusiasm around a wealth of products that were yet to be created. The modern era of consumerism was born! THE ASSEMBLY LINE “Any customer can have a car painted any colour that he wants so long as it is black.” Henry Ford, speaking about the the Model T in 1909 The assembly line would come a little after mass production had started, and while Henry Ford is often credited with inventing it (though this is untrue), he certainly mastered its techniques as he went on to mass market the Model T, selling over fifteen million4 over its lifespan which reached from 1908 to 1927. “[The true genius of Henry Ford] was marketing. We think he was able to cut his selling price and therefore sell millions of $500 cars because his invention of the assembly line had reduced the costs. Actually he invented the assembly line because he had concluded that at $500 he could sell millions of cars. Mass production was the result, not the cause of his low prices.” Theodore Levitt, Innovation in Marketing In order to create an ultra-efficient assembly line process, everyone needs to know what they are building, how they are building, and what exact role they play along the way. A rigid set of requirements, set in place well before anyone on the team starts making anything is a necessity in this situation. Think about any number of large projects that either have a single outcome or that must mass produce many things that all look and work the same: •Skyscraper •Televisions •Lunar landing •Sneakers •Ballpoint pens When you plan to construct a 50-story building, it’s highly important that everyone involved knows what they are doing and where everything goes before the work starts. No one wants a surprise when the building is 85% complete. At that point, a single change can cost millions of dollars. The same thing applies to a mass produced product like a television. A last minute change has many repercussions on how it is manufactured and marketed. At the price point of virtually any mass produced product, it simply isn’t feasible to go back and make a last-minute fix to hundreds, thousands, or millions of completed products. This is especially apparent when it comes to product recalls. Take, for instance the Takata airbag recall, the largest such in United States automotive history5, which has affected seventeen automakers and in excess of 200 million vehicles. Consider the cost of such a recall, whose estimates range anywhere from $3.4 to $24 Billion6. Clearly, there is a price to be paid for an error made during the mass manufacturing process. HOW DOES MASS PRODUCTION RELATE TO WEBSITES? You may be asking yourself how this relates to the subject of this e-book: websites, and their design and development. Well, it doesn’t take too much of a stretch to find a correlation between the amount of pre-planning, specification and design a large website requires, and the planning that an item that may be manufactured using mass production methods. Both require a large upfront investment, which is technically unproven until the product launch. While many very sophisticated methods of research have been created and refined over the years which have made this easier, there is still a lot of risk involved in making wide-reaching decisions based on hypothetical evidence. This is what makes great researchers, great, but even the best can’t predict the unpredictable. An advertisement for “New Coke,” circa April 1985. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. Think about some of the worse product launch failures, and you can see the potential for disaster. In the early 1980s, Coca-Cola was struggling to maintain market share and losing ground to Pepsi. Coca-Cola executives initiated “Project Kansas” which had the task of researching and evaluating what could be done. Extensive market research7 found that one of the key differences between Coke and Pepsi was the latter’s sweeter taste. When focus groups were presented with a third, sweeter alternative to either Coke or Pepsi, they inevitably leaned towards the third choice. The rest is history. Upon launch of the new Coke, there was immediate backlash by brand devotees, accompanied by lackluster sales to the general public, and after several attempts to undo the damage done, including the re-introduction of classic Coke, eventually the new recipe was phased out and discontinued. Replace your organization’s website with Coca-Cola in that scenario. While you may not spend as much on a website redesign as Coke spent on a new formula, you can see how making large investments pose a risk that the end product may not be as successful as your research may suggest. Am I saying that there is something wrong with mass production? Not necessarily, and certainly not in all cases. In many cases, mass production is not only a necessity, but a perfect solution to a huge challenge. But there may be a better way to produce many types of products, including websites, that allows for more flexibility in the process, more feedback to drive positive change, and less overall rigidity which can create a disconnect between the environment which existed during the project initiation, and the environment in which the project launches. BEFORE AGILE EARLY COMPUTER PROGRAMMING The Backspace key was only useful in the rare case that you spaced past a column that you needed to punch; you could backspace and restrike the column. Of course if the column was mispunched, you swore under your breath, hit the release key to feed the current card, duped up to the error using the next blank card, then continued punching from that point. When you released this card (or it auto-released after column 80) you quickly grabbed the mis-punched card out of the flipper as it was being stacked and threw it in the trashcan, which was invariably on the left side of the keypunch for this purpose. Loren Wilton, a Burroughs/Unisys employee in the early days of computer programming Let’s get back to something a little more “on topic” to the subject matter of this e-book: computer programming. While it’s important to know how we got where we did, it’s time to look more in depth at the origins of software creation. It’s hard to believe, but until the 1970s, almost all computer programming was done via “punch cards,” which were hand punched by a key punch machine, and read by card readers. This process was used from the 1940s and was a tedious process which, as partially described in the quote above, required a lot of pre-planning in order to provide proper instructions to the computer. The very first punch cards actually date back to the late 19th century where they were used to complete the 1890 census. These were the days when the term “computer” was actually a job description for a person. Early days indeed! Example of a computer punch card. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. As time progressed and machines became more sophisticated (IBM was consistently the key player throughout the early history of the computer), the process itself still relied on pre-planning and having a detailed plan of what to do so that the cumbersome process of programming could be completed as quickly as possible without needing to improvise or rethink a series of calculations while operating the key punching machinery. There was no “undo,” “copy and paste,” or...