Projects

« return to Projects

Quality Leadership Process

screenshot Static Screen (new window)
Now here was a challenging project. For design I was given a logo that somebody had spliced together with some clip-art. For content I was given page upon page of fields that needed to be collected, with requirements changing based on the status of an item. But the biggest challenge was GWT (Google Web Toolkit). The platform, which allows Java developers to write interactive AJAX style interfaces in their native language, had been out for 2 days when we began coding this project. But we tried it anyway. The result was a shift in our entire workflow, as any time that I needed a CSS class added to an element, I had to request it from a Java developer. Having no access to the HTML gave me a whole new understanding of the concept of separation of style from content. I might also make some disparaging remarks about the quality of the HTML produced by GWT, but they're smart folk over at Google, they did what they did for a reason, so that the interfaces it produces look as intended without a professional stylesheet.

This project represented a huge milestone for the company, unifying all production plants around the globe under one process. This meant a vocabulary shift for many of the users. Because of these changes I decided that for this application the help text wasn't going to be tucked into a corner, it was going to come first. And not only did I put the user guide in the left hand column, I made it dynamic, changing when the user went to a new tab, and interactive, checking off items from a task list as data was entered.