Lessons from the Scope Creep
Scope creep can be a big influence on any venture. I recently experienced scope creep on a project. Luckily, this project didn’t have as high of stakes as one of my design projects at work — there wasn’t a client depending on me delivering something for their business. This was a school project for my Digital Publishing II class. However, scope creep caused me to miss the deadline for the assignment.
“The greatest teacher, failure is.” — Yoda
Despite my project not turning out the way I wanted it to by the deadline, I learned a lot from it. I will use these lessons going forward when I am working on other projects for work or for school.
The Synopsis
The task we were assigned to do was to redesign and polish a project from our Digital Publishing I class. For this particular project, my professor allowed us to resubmit our projects by the end of the semester so we have time to revise it more if we’d like. For some context; I’ve already written about the project I am in the process of revisiting in this article.
Project Goals
The project is a digital publication for the iPad created with an InDesign plugin called Mag+. I made my digital magazine about geology. The publication contains five articles, an advertisement, a table of contents, a help page, and a cover page. It also contains a lot of interactive content and media which is demonstrated in my previous article. I felt pretty good about the publication when I completed it a year and half ago but with what I have learned since then I felt like I could improve it.
Some ways I wanted to improve the publication were to make it have a wow factor, make it delightful to use, improve the typography, enhance interactivity, revamp the layout and overall look, and increase usability. I feel like I was able to partially accomplish most of those goals by the initial deadline.
Partial Successes
One of the ways in which scope creep came into effect was by me focusing too much on the wow factor aspect of my goals. The bulk of my time on this project was spent reworking an article about the layers of the Earth. In the original publication the article took up five screens, known in Mag+ as verticals. I was working on consolidating the content onto one interactive screen also know as a vertical.
The vertical, that I managed to execute to a lower standard than I had hoped, contains an animation of the four different layers of the Earth, each sliding out at the top of the vertical when the reader scrolls over each of the sections in the article dedicated to each of the layers.
Please click the box below the image to view the progress of the animation so you can get an idea of how it will work.
The idea is to have the other two layers slide out as well. This animation turned out to be ridiculously complex due to original image I was working with which has all four of the layers partially obscuring each other.
I spent four to eight hours manipulating this image in Photoshop into fifteen different images, each one a segment of one of the four layers. For all of the layers except for the inner core (the yellow, round layer), I had to use the clone stamp tool in Photoshop to fill in the missing content that is obscured by another layer. It was a lot of work but I think this article will be incredibly interactive and more interesting as a result.
Because of my devotion to this one feature, I spent at least fifteen hours on the animation alone. As a result the rest of the project suffered. I would have done better to work on this aspect of the project for maybe four hours, then have gone back to another part of the publication that needed to be finished.
Instead this aspect of the project became a time-suck. I do consider this a partial success though because when it is done, my publication will be more interactive and I think this could provide a wow factor to the project. In the future I will divide up my time more evenly across the whole project I am working on and not just on one part of it.
Another goal of mine that I partially accomplished was improving the typography. I have selected typefaces that are easier to read and are better thought out. Typography is a crucial part of any project and I’m glad I spent some time improving the typography in the magazine by selecting new typefaces.
Re-Skinning the Background
One of my biggest goals with the publication redesign was to have more interesting backgrounds. I used the same basic, grey background for all of my original geology publication backgrounds. I felt like this was boring and it was something I overlooked. One of the things I focused on primarily with the work on this redesign was the table of contents page.
I ended up repurposing the design I came up with for the table of contents page to also use for the backgrounds throughout my magazine. So essentially I did the same thing I original had but with a more interesting background. I view this as a failure and I need to improve the vector graphic I came up with to include shading and more thought to the color.
For my table of contents page I really wanted to do something interesting with it. Instead of just having a light grey text box behind each of the article titles on a dark grey background, I wanted to make each section be part of an isometric rock formation. I decided to do use an isometric design because isometric art is one of my favorite visual techniques.
Isometric perspective is basically a pseudo-3D perspective. Everything is broken down into a grid with lines going across the screen at an angle of 30° and 150°.
I started planning out my table of contents on paper. I made a sketch of the general idea I had for it. I wanted it to look like each article title was part of the side of a cliff. After drawing the initial sketch I got to work in Illustrator.
I set up an isometric grid and made some rectangles for the background behind each article title. Then I used the pen tool and started drawing irregular shapes with the endpoints always landing on one of the intersections of the isometric grid. I’m really happy with how the vectorized version turned out. I still have to do some shading to make it more realistic looking but I am happy with the result so far.
Failures
While I had some partial successes in this project, I also had several goals that I failed to achieve. Some things I still need to work on is to improve the consistency of the layout, add intro and conclusion sections, create a bibliography to attribute unoriginal content, enhance usability, revise navigation, and fix a few icons. By focusing on two specific sections I lost track of the overall progress of the project. Both of these sections ended up taking more time than I anticipated. In the end I spent too long on a relatively small amount of the publication. I focused on making two features extraordinary instead of delivering minimum delightful products — this resulted in two partially finished features and all other content unchanged.
Ways to Improve
If I were to approach this project again I would try to have better time management and attempt to make progress on more aspects of the project. I would divide and conquer each part of the redesign. Instead of focusing all my time and energy into two parts, I would work for a few hours on each section and move on to other sections so that I would make more overall progress.
It is good to have learned lesson in one of my classes instead of at work. I ended up getting a B on the project but I plan on refining the rest of digital magazine when I get a chance.This project had a soft deadline vs a hard deadline and for that I am grateful. When working for a client, deadlines are not as malleable.
Edit: I recently came across an article that I have found helpful for managing scope creep. The article is from the Toptal design blog found here:
https://www.toptal.com/how-to-prevent-and-manage-scope-creep
Russell Andlauer is a Digital Product Design Contractor at a Utah-Based Development Company. He also does some freelance work on the side. He is finishing up his Bachelor’s degree in Web Design & Development with an emphasis in Interaction & Design at Utah Valley University near Salt Lake City.
