A Helping Hand(book)

A Planet 4 website to learn more about… Planet 4

Since Day One of the Planet 4 project, we realized that to deliver a successful product for Greenpeace, we would not only need to deliver a brand new engagement system (the prototype), but also a fully functional toolkit to understand, implement and use it. We named such a toolkit the Planet 4 Handbook, and it will be a WordPress install itself.

The artefacts for the finished product should be 1. A Website for Planet 4 and 2. The Handbook that explains how to spin off and work with the Planet 4 design (primarily focused on NRO implementations).

As Laura mentioned in her post, the Handbook “will contain all the resources to learn, implement, master and improve the tool. It will gather links and guides, templates and training documentation to help the community get through preparation, deployment and launch of Planet 4 websites.”

The Goals

Since the first design sprint, the product team and contributors from within and outside Greenpeace worked closely, shaping a first set of goals for the Handbook portion of the project. It should:

• easily introduce the vision and concept for the engagement platform
• create a shared vocabulary across designers and project teams, and eventually anyone who spins up their own Greenpeace site
• provide tools, guides and templates for content creation and technical implementation
• be editable and remixable by whoever wants to contribute
• be easy to use and simply designed

Already underway

Starting from a massive brain dump combined with a list of needs from NRO future contributors, we did a bit of cleanup and drafted a wiki-like document for the Handbook content. Once the WordPress install will be ready, all this will go online

The Handbook is organized based on how contributors will use it. We identified three pathways that will be displayed on the homepage: 1) for people empowering their teams, 2) for people making content, and 3) for people who are maintaining the site. This framework continues to provide us general direction in writing the instructional content. Under each one of these pathways we will organically be adding guides and documentation that will take the guesswork out of creating interactive content for Greenpeace websites.

Under construction! The Handbook content is being drafted by a rotating cast of characters.

With the general framework in place, we were able to design a simple sitemap:

A sitemap containing 4 basic pages: the handbook home, a page for “getting started” content, “ a page for anyone who might create content (images, text or visualizations) and a page for anyone involved in the development and deployment of the site.

The sitemap is giving us even more structure so that it will hopefully be easy for future contributors to the content creation to simply add their guides and tutorials.

Finally, we drafted a look and feel mockup. This was actually a bit like testing out Planet 4 itself because we had to apply the design to the mockups. The major structural difference for the Handbook is that it incorporates a vertical navigation.

While the Handbook mockup incorporates a vertical navigation, it is an implementation of Planet 4 itself.

What’s next

The Handbook will be released in its very first version, hopefully people will freely take and use it to learn more about P4 and prepare the transitions for each office. This first release will be also crucial to collect feedback and improve the product as we go. The Handbook is designed to be what’s called “living,” meaning that it will evolve and continue to be edited. The final product will live online, which means that we will need to translate these static designs into the ultimate interactive tool.

We know we won’t include everything in this first version — in fact, we’re just getting started. We will need your help to tell us what’s missing and can be improved.

Please share your feedback with us in the comments. How could we make the Handbook even more useful to you?