The Planet 4 prototype is live! Welcome to the new greenpeace.org
What is the P4 Beta website and why we are launching it in Beta
On July 12th, 2016 we officially launched the Planet 4 project. Way back then there was nary a team, budget or roadmap — only a vision: to change Greenpeace’s online presence by creating a platform that would drive people to action.
Today, we’re launching our Beta. When accessing the international website*, people from all over the world will now interact with Planet 4, Greenpeace’s new engagement platform.
As the Product Owner, it’s a relief to write this post and finally see the outcome of all of this hard work. More importantly, I am anxious to see the first reactions and get everyone’s feedback; from the teen activist to the senior executive, from the sailor to the campaigner. Everyone’s feedback will be essential in further developing the platform.
Live, but in BETA mode
Although P4 is now the new Greenpeace International website, it will evolve from this first iteration. Once the Project team takes a moment to celebrate this long awaited milestone, we will dive right back in to work on delivering the “fast follow” features. For launch, we deprioritised certain features so that we could launch early and often, starting with our Minimum Viable Product. However, we want to build out our concept, and the “fast follow” features are important components to the full vision of the engagement platform we’re building.
Today, Planet 4 is 1 Master (and 1 Child) Wordpress Theme, 37 pages, 343 Posts, 9 Categories and 14 tags. Tomorrow, it will be all the 1,073 (and growing) user stories, and much more.
Where’s all the content?
Alongside innovation there are still campaign projects to amplify. Our active global campaigns will be accessible on Planet 4 from the start, but the vast majority of Greenpeace International’s institutional content will only be accessible on the old site, Planet 3.
This means that the old and the new Content Management Systems will run in parallel for a brief time. One reason for this is because the archival solution for everything that didn’t migrate to P4 is still being put into place. (Interesting fact: of the 11,175 pages on P3 only roughly 350 were migrated to P4.)
The site architecture reflects the new approach taken in designing Planet 4. The way Greenpeace’s campaigns are presented and how the site is navigated has been completely reframed. Some folks might find this jarring, but we hope this organic, tag-based navigation will make content consumption easier and increase the number of actions taken.
So by keeping the old site in place while transitioning to the new one, we will be able to better measure the P4 user experience and know whether site visitors are actually finding what they are looking for and if in fact they are happy to leave the old ways behind.
Live, but still evolving (with your feedback)
The reason behind the the soft, beta launch was to better gather actionable and real-time user feedback. We are aware that P4 is far from perfect; it is, after all, a prototype. Which means that all feedback and input will be key to prioritise development efforts going forward.
On all devices, you should notice a Feedback button on every page. This button will allow you to give us either very specific or more general feedback.
Whichever option you choose, the feedback session will only track from which city/country you will submit, on which type of device (mobile, tablet or laptop) and its Operating System, and on which type of browser (Firefox, Chrome, etc) is being used. Aside from that, all feedback is completely anonymous.
The full methodology is described in this awesome post by Vini, but in a nutshell, selecting specific feedback allows you to choose a specific part of the page (for example, the headline on the homepage) and make a suggestion, leave a compliment or report a bug.
Opting to give generic feedback will allow you to select an emoji that best describes your overall experience with the site and to also make a suggestion, leave a compliment or report a bug.
Blown away? Tell us how much. Disappointed? Tell us why. Were you hoping to see something different? Or have thoughts about the navigation? Please tell us, and be as descriptive as you can.
As detailed in Vini’s post, we will also offer a second method to give feedback on your Planet 4 experience and that’s via a 3-minute survey. The survey will pop-up on every device and browser after visiting at least 3 pages, and will contain more detailed feedback options. If you want to have more time before weighing it, click on “Not now” and you’ll be given another opportunity to weigh in on your next visit.
We hope you enjoy the new site! Please do give us feedback and/or take the survey. We really do want to hear what you think.
*N.B. If you’re still landing on the old site, you may just have to clear your cache. ;-)
