Ultra-rapid development to support the stories
As we progress through the season, certain stories play out. The Club regularly backs-up each of these stories with a tonne of additional content; whether that’s video from CityTV or something a little more bespoke. In this case though, the question was around the ‘if’ scenario and how we build for something that might not happen.
In this case, with the the Carabou Cup Final looming, the Cityzens team wanted to do something to mark the occasion. We’re fortunate — and unfortunate — to be governed by some very fixed deadlines, but this one was tight. We had around three weeks to develop something that would add a little extra colour to the cup and a little extra fun — representing what Cityzens is all about.
Getting users to submit messages to the team ahead of the game was a first nod to this and we would embrace the #together sentiment.
Working with our design and development partners, we had the steer around developing a tool that would enable users to have their photo taken with the cup, should we win.
With last year’s launch of Cityzens we’d built a platform that enabled rich content to be scheduled by the team directly into the platform. This time, we wanted to try something a little different so we worked to open up Cityzens to a whole new way of ingesting content. Something that will both support the cup requirement, but also deliver increased flexibility in the future so we have a tool we can use again. Win/win.
The actual development-phase was a collaboration between City’s Digital and FRM teams and our build partners. And involved an exciting number of ‘what if’ scenarios, late nights and changing requirements.
From the initial scoping session to creating the APIs to allow content to be posted into Cityzens, the team focused on creating a tool quickly, that still followed the design conventions of the site. We couldn’t get this 100% right, we know, but as part of the post-release review session, we’ve identified that there’s a bit of design polish to add to the creation flow and also to reduce a pesky second “login” prompt, even if you’re already logged in.
These are the types of items that got flagged in testing and we had to make a call on whether they were important enough to pull the launch. They weren’t. But they got added to the backlog.
In terms of our story, we successfully integrated this tool into Cityzens which will give us much more flexibility in the future, we cooked up a design, translated it, enabled a (pretty decent, if we say so ourselves) experience on both mobile and desktop and easily supported sharing both to your Cityzens timeline and social media.
All of this involved some very long sessions, a very early Saturday morning test/deploy session and some very rapid problem-solving as we approached crunch. It was a digital build at its most ‘colourful’.
As we watched the game unfold, the product had been tested and scheduled, ready for the result. We would press the big “go” button at the exact time of the cup lift, which we did and we began to see interaction almost immediately. Social engagement was strong and the number of submissions was encouraging, whilst the service remained stable.
Now. Creating this ability to share to Cityzens, raises an interesting number of questions — some of which we’re already working on — but it highlights the need to keep content within both your ‘feed’ and also your ‘profile’. There’s a raft of improvements that we’ve spotted here, just by going through this (non-related…) exercise. It’s these types of wins that we like and enable us to continue to develop the platform.
And — the great thing with this tool specifically is that it’s brilliantly re-usable…. More on that over the next couple of weeks. Hopefully.
