Not too shabby

Good week so far! Where should I start? I guess I'll take it chronologically.

Monday in the cafeteria I ran into a familiar face, a former co-worker from my last company! Talk about a small world. We're working in different product verticals, but my department and his work very closely, so I'm sure I'll be seeing more of him around over time.

Tuesday at 10:45am I uploaded the first final version of the user experience spec for my first full project. I say "first final" because I am living in the real world and everybody knows that little issues can and will keep coming up long after design is "final." Nonetheless, this was a major milestone and I'm very happy with how it has all come together. In the afternoon, revelling in my newfound (yet oh-so-temporary) downtime I took a look back at emails and documents to recall the project timeline:

• 11/27/07 -- I was hired.
• 11/28/07 -- Project kickoff at 3pm.
• 11/29/07 -- Three hours of brainstorming meetings. By midday I had stopped working on mockup skeletons (made in PowerPoint and Paint on the kiosk) and started using my brand new laptop.
• 12/1/07 -- First draft mockups of the four core new pages were up for review. Functionality and overall design of these pages would stand the test of time.
• 12/7/07 -- The full breadth of the key page flow the project encompassed was shared with the team in a slide deck. Mockups by this time were fairly high-fidelity. I began woring on the second of two key flows that had been planned for the project. The first draft (a real skeleton) of the MRD was distributed. The first page flow was also officially split into two by this time.
• 12/8/07 -- Mockups of the screens of the third flow were presented in a PowerPoint.
• 12/13/07 -- A first draft set of clickable HTML prototypes were delivered. Normally prototypes are done by web developers, but we didn't have any webdev support as yet, so I downloaded a trial version of Dreamweaver and did them myself in "Can't Believe It's Not Butter" fidelity. Three click paths were supported in the initial prototype set, including some dynamic functionality.
• 12/14/07 -- First review with the PM director and the VP of UED (UI/UR/visual/content). The VP was very late, so the review was very brief.
• 12/18/07 -- Full formal executive review attended by the VP, three directors, the PMM, TPM, visual designer, myself, and a couple other folks who joined late and whose roles I did not learn.
• 12/18/07 through 12/20/07 -- Usability tests were conducted using polished prototypes. It was pretty smooth sailing. All tested users were able to complete their requested tasks without help. Nearly all of the feedback we received pointed to needs for refinements in text, not design, which was great because our content specialist had not yet developed formal proposals for text entries in our pages.
• 1/2/2007 -- First draft functional spec review.
• 1/16/2007 -- First formal UED spec delivery. The document was at this point supposed to cover the first two core page flows, but in reality it covered all 11 (including 3 that had been flagged as either out of scope or blocked for technical or legal reasons).
• 1/23/2007 -- Second UED spec delivery, officially covering all flows (with the reject bin taking one more victim).
• 1/24/2007 -- Development began.
• 1/25/2007 -- It hasn't happened yet as of this writing, but on this day, my Outlook Deleted Items folder will surpass 1,000 items. Mind you, all important emails relating to the above project are kept in a separate folder and not deleted.

The morning of 1/24 began with the kickoff meeting for my new major project. This one is being led on the PM side by the only current coworker who actually knows about this blog. I'd better key away quietly -- he/she could be reading it as I type!

Oh, one other thing. I listened to the earnings report with my team today. It sounded good.