Web Publishers’ Community – April update
This month’s WPC session focused on the EdWeb Roadmap, campus maps development and included a special guest talk from University-turned-Skyscanner employee David Pier.
EdWeb Project Update – Bruce Darby
Migration has now finished, with the University homepage going live on 19th April.
Now we’re in the process of getting ready to decommission Polopoly, so have a read of our archiving instructions if you haven’t already.
Archiving instructions on support wiki
Bruce suggested editors have a check over their sites to make sure there are no links to documents stored in Polopoly, and if so, move these documents to EdWeb.
EdWeb Roadmap – Bruce Darby
We’ve recently put out a survey to the University website community to help us prioritise future EdWeb enhancements. Bruce explained the long neck theory, where we expect the survey results to show that a small number of features receive the majority of the votes, which will subsequently be the feature we focus on developing.
Get to know your long neck blog post
Our survey is based on our new EdWeb roadmap—a tool which helps us communicate what had been deployed, what is being deployed and what could be de deployed in future.
The roadmap is divided into themes (high level grouping of areas of development), epic groups (add further information and clarity to themes) and epics (high-level overviews of particular areas of functionality for EdWeb).
EdWeb Development roadmap wiki page
Campus Maps – Callum Kerr
Callum gave us a demonstration of the new Campus Maps page in EdWeb, both on mobile and non-mobile devices. The new Campus Maps page includes an A-Z search and touch-friendly toggles.
From the University to Skyscanner: experiences in product management- David Pier
David Pier, formally an Academic eFacilitator at the University, joined us to talk about his job as a Product Manager at Skyscanner.
David described the product management routine while at the University as consisting of identifying the user need, design brief, development and finally shipping the product. In contrast, Skyscanner uses a lean agile method, which sees the creation of a prototype, user testing and refinement before development begins. This allows the company to build as fast and fail as fast as possible.
Skyscanner uses Spotify’s squad model, which divides the company into small self-organising groups that have end-to-end responsibility for the area they work on. This localised structure aids in faster development as decisions don’t need to wait for approval from managers and committees.
Spotify engineering culture video
David shared an example of some of the work he’s been involved in, namely making improvements to the site’s mobile interface for flight results. He explained that when new features are developed, the feature is shipped to half the users, while things stay the same for the other half. This allows them to see whether the feature has made a positive impact, and if so, the feature is shipped. If there is a negative impact (or none), improvements are made until they get it right or they decide no impact is to be had.
May WPC
Join us at our next Web Publishers’ Community in May.
