Strategy Blog: Viget Labs

Carolyn Hack - Project Manager :

As Viget Labs’ newest Project Manager, I’ve been learning the ropes here for the past couple of weeks. I spent my first week at HQ in Falls Church, Va., discussing Viget’s constantly evolving project processes and learning the finer points of Viget culture from my new team members. (It’s perfectly acceptable to make peanut butter sandwiches at your desk. I’m going to fit right in!)

After that initial week of guided training, I returned to Viget South in Durham, N.C., and continued learning on my own, reviewing successful web projects my colleagues have managed, asking questions about their experiences with different types of client engagements, and taking notes about techniques I admire or helpful tips they’ve given me. One of the things that impressed me was just how easy it was to go back and review those completed projects, even without the guidance of the project managers who saw them through to completion. Each past engagement was clearly documented with a set of deliverables, making it simple to follow the decisions the project team made at each stage of a web site’s life cycle.

One of the required reads for all Viget project managers is Dan M. Brown’s Communicating Design, which I’ve begun to read this week. Brown’s book encourages communication about web site planning and development using effective documentation. Since I’ve worked in user experience design for several years, none of the deliverables he describes are unfamiliar to me; but, it’s been interesting to compare some of his document creation and presentation techniques with Viget’s real-life examples.

Although Viget’s documentation varies based on the requirements, scope, and timeline for each web site, it’s always created for the same purpose:  keeping all project team members focused on the same goal. By clearly expressing user needs, site design, and strategy decisions made over the course of a project, good web site documentation also allows even uninvolved observers to understand the motivations for designing a site in a particular way, including or excluding features, or writing copy with a certain audience in mind.

Continue reading "Hello, World!"

M. Jackson Wilkinson - Strategist :

Nearly everyone was surprised (not shocked, but surprised) over the weekend to find out that Google had been building its own browser for months now, named Chrome, slated for release today. The goal was ostensibly to rethink the typical web browser and build a new one from scratch designed to cater to the current and future generation of the web. When Google moves into an established space with a completely new product offering, you know they're not messing around, and Chrome definitely deserves to be taken seriously. Even its announcement has already started to change the way we think about the web. Read on to find out how.

Continue reading "What Google Chrome Already Means to the Web"