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This was the largest publishing project ever done at TERC, the not-for-profit education research company where I worked for more than three years. TERC educators created several hundred ”Investigations” and ”Visualizations.” These were illustrated with several hundred original drawings, Flash movies, Quicktime clips, or Director movies.
TERC was unprepared for this challenge: the senior project manager admitted, ”Before Exploring Earth, my content developers and I had never even heard of production teams, let alone worked with one.”
What I did:
- Creating and overseeing the Production Team. At its height it had 10 professional illustrators, animators, DTP professionals, and coders. As much as anyone, these talented professionals made ”Exploring Earth” a success.
- Developing, designing and testing significant refinements to the home page graphics, the primary navigation, and screens displaying large arrays of ”Visualizations” and ”Explorations.”
- Design and coding of global navigation, including fly-out menus.
- Working with backend developers to integrate database content into page templates.
- Playing an active role in regular reviews of works-in-progress to identify usabilty issues, non-adherence to technical standards, and feature creep.
- Usability testing. These tests exposed interface shortcomings that some teammembers, myself among them, had red-flagged throughout the development cycle. It took the proof that testing provided to finally make the case.*
* Politcial issues prevented testing until after classroom evaluation was underway. The UI issues were severe enough that additional funding was needed to fix them. It was an excellent illustration of the value of doing the right testing at the right time. :–)
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