The Daniel Pearl Capstone Team Report
Emily Stewart, Eddie Kirsch, Jenny Barrett, Yara Kilmchak
May 13, 2011
Synopsis
This report reflects the efforts put forth by the Daniel Pearl Capstone team and the progress we made toward re-designing the Daniel Pearl Foundation’s website: danielpearl.org. Working with two clients, Ruth Pearl and Paul Karlsen, we strived to pay close attention to the needs of our clients while at the same time promote new and fresh ideas to the Daniel Pearl Foundation website.
For our efforts, we repeatedly encountered a few difficulties. Primarily, our greatest difficulty was determining an effective systematic plan that would have us put our best foot forward at each of our goals. This problem would proceed to plague us, as we would occasionally overlook a step that was important only to have to revisit the step, slowing progress down.
These problems aside, this report ultimately reflects the growth of our experience working with real-world clients who need a product. We were able to collaborate, work to with the clients, and produce a product that reflects the research we have done and the needs of the client as well. Ultimately, we are able to mark this as a positive achievement for a well-known and respected organization. From where we began in January to where we have ended in May, we believe you will see in this report a team that overcame inexperience and differences in viewpoints to put together a product the Daniel Pearl Foundation can work with.
Introduction
In January 2011, we were assigned to work with the Daniel Pearl Foundation to produce a new website for danielpearl.org for our capstone project. We had our first meeting with our clients the very first week of school. On that day, the four of us shuffled into a small conference room hidden in a corner of Neff Hall. It took a little while for us to figure out the speakerphone, but eventually we were able to connect with our clients for what would be the first time of many this semester. Our clients, as it turns out, were Paul Karlsen, the program director of the Daniel Pearl Foundation, and Ruth Pearl, the mother of Daniel Pearl.
Though we knew who Daniel Pearl was, we were quite young when he was killed in 2002. Hearing Ruth talk about her son was quite passionate and very moving. By the end of the conference call, all of us understood that this was an important project, and that our work would make a difference to our clients and the people they served. At the same time, however, we also understood that our knowledge domain of working with a client and the process of building a website was limited. Our first goal, therefore, would be to research our client, the Daniel Pearl Foundation, and at the same time research non-profit web design.
Research
The mission statement at the top of danielpearl.org reads:
“The Daniel Pearl Foundation was formed in memory of journalist Daniel Pearl to further the ideals that inspired Daniel's life and work. The Foundation's mission is to promote tolerance and understanding internationally through journalism, music and dialogue.”
The Daniel Pearl Foundation, in essence, is a relatively small organization with worldwide recognition. It has three areas it works in, which the foundation calls Journalism, Music and Lectures/Dialogue. Each of these three areas is unique and separate from one another. For example, under music, the foundation promotes its Daniel Pearl World Music Days, while under dialogue the foundation has the Daniel Pearl Dialogue for Muslim-Jewish Understanding — a series of conversations between Judea Pearl, father of Daniel, and Akbar Ahmed, Chair of Islamic Studies at American University. The distinctions of programs that fall under these three areas are fairly dynamic and attract different audiences to them. However, all support the main theme of the Daniel Pearl Foundation — cross-cultural understanding and awareness.
From their web stats (shown in appendix), we found that the Daniel Pearl Foundation web site attracts around 4000-5000 unique visitors each month. The top ten countries that this traffic is coming from show a very diverse audience including: the United States, Germany, Israel, and China. Notably, it seems that 80 percent of danielpearl.org visitors leave within 30 seconds of the site, and about 90 percent leave within five minutes of visiting.
These facts, particularly the last one, are a bit distressing. The Daniel Pearl Foundation endorses and supports numerous programs, however, it seems for one reason or another potentially interested visitors seem to be turned away. One theory for why this occurs is due to flaws in the navigation, aesthetics and overall design of the site. Specifically, the design was outdated, text-heavy, visually unappealing and uninviting. From our non-profit research we discovered that it was important to make our site donor, media, and volunteer friendly, as well as clearly stating its purpose. Additionally, content should take center stage, and there should be some way visitors can keep up to date with the organization. Lastly, logo & colors should be consistent with the promotional material (Smashing Magazine).
As we saw from Vandelay Design’s “40 of the Best Websites of Non-Profit Organizations”, all of the designs contained these same rules. Specifically, when visiting each site we witnessed a coherent display and navigation. The sites were inviting and promoted user interaction via twitter feeds, news updates, etc. The sites promoted a strong, inspirational message that was difficult not to be drawn to.
We proceeded to approach our capstone project as an exercise in problem solving. Our problem, as we understood it, was that the Daniel Pearl Foundation had an outdated website that lacked coherence from a functional and visual standpoint. Secondly, while we had been asked to fix this, another problem was that we had a limited knowledge domain about web design for clients. To combat this, we needed a systematic plan. First, we would draft up a few mock-ups for the design, and second, we would work on the navigation. We would consult professionals and professors that we knew to ask for help if we felt lost. If need be, we would retreat back to researching our problem if we didn’t believe we could proceed forward. Eventually, once the navigation and the design were for the most part worked out, we would code the site, and give it to our clients. We believed this was a goal achievable by following such a plan, even with the limited amount of time and limited knowledge we had.
Mock ups
Initially, our goal was to design a few homepage mock-ups ourselves to give our clients a choice between a few different concepts for their site. However, after consulting with Joy Mayer and Kristin Kellogg, we felt the designs we had were not sophisticated enough. In particular, it appeared to Joy and Kristin that we did not have a cohesive concept of what our clients wanted. In fact, the diversity of our designs, which we initially believed was a good idea, ultimately made the designs appear unprofessional (designs in appendix). We lacked the fundamentals skills of a design student since we focus more on the multimedia aspect in our studies.
After explaining this in our first presentation, we met with Professors Mike McKean and Randy Smith to talk about hiring some sort of outside help for this area of the project. We settled on setting up a design contest open to all students with the incentive of a $500 reward. For this contest, we gave a packet of information about who the Daniel Pearl Foundation was, what we wanted to do, and why this project was important (in appendix). While initiating this contest, we also identified a need to do more research, particularly in what consumers want when they come to a site. Addressing this need, we agreed to read Steve Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think! A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability. This book, although originally published 11 years ago, contained valuable information about the functionality of any given website. That is, Krug suggests that websites should be self-explanatory. They shouldn’t waste someone’s time, and should not be frustrating to work with. He promotes that we are creatures of habit and, once we figure out how to work something one way, we stick to that. This research inevitably helped us settle on a design when our contest was over. However, it also helped us frame how we should think about navigation for danielpearl.org, which we will discuss more later in this report.
After about two weeks, we closed our contest and showed what we believed were the best designs to our clients. In a unanimous agreement, we settled on a designer, Alex Prestel. We choose Alex because we believed her design exhibited the most talent and experience, although there were a number of changes we wanted to see (versions of her design in appendix). Alex as it turned out, was an ideal designer to work with. She was very receptive to our clients’ ideas, and was also not afraid to make her own suggestions. She stayed on as a part of our team for a few weeks after her design was accepted — to the point were we felt we could take over the remaining design alterations.
Design Alterations & Site navigation
We thought going into spring break that the design we had settled for the most part on was what our clients had wanted. However, over spring break we received a long email explaining everything they would like to see changed. Mostly, our clients wanted more options in nearly every aspect of the design.
This was a critical period for our capstone. Time was dwindling. Simultaneously, we were required to make design and logo alterations, work on the site navigation, and begin to code. Unsure of what our clients really wanted to see in a different design, we provided several different logo options and design layouts. Our clients received this positively and we were able to settle (for the most part) on a design. Meanwhile, we also worked on the site navigation. Using a hierarchical model to lay out the navigation, we also were able to settle on the navigation (in appendix). Outside of the coding and site navigation, we thought that some sort of interesting content should be created. Randy Smith helped us suggest a few options to Ruth and Paul as to how to generate a larger audience for the site. One of the suggestions included having the Daniel Pearl fellows contribute to the site. He suggested they put their work on the site because it would make the site more dynamic. We learned that in order for users to continue coming back to a site their have to be updates.
Coding and finishing stages
When we began coding, we knew we still had a lot to do in a short amount of time; however, we made the decision to hard code the site. Knowing that it would take more time to do so, we believed that hard coding would ultimately be most beneficial to our clients. Paul previously was updating the site through a text edit program, so by hard coding, it would be possible for him to update news and events as he previously had. Additionally, hard coding ensured that our site would work well with Google services, especially Google Translate, which was important considering the global audience of the organization. Lastly, through coding with html and JQuery, the Daniel Pearl Foundation’s site would be friendlier to tablets and other mobile devices.
During the coding period of our capstone, we also worked on filling out the content we identified as absent on the Daniel Pearl Foundation web site. For example, we interviewed Umar Cheema, a previous Daniel Pearl Fellow who was recently the victim of kidnapping. We believed interviewing a prior Daniel Pearl Fellow such as Umar Cheema would help add a human element to the web site. More additions included the use of statistics and infographics (in appendix), which we believed illustrated the impact of the foundation, by the numbers.
These final stages of our capstone tested our will and our ability to work under pressure. Ultimately, we realized that despite working late into the morning several nights, we would not reach our initial goal of creating a complete and tested site for our clients. With this realization, we knew we had to get enough completed to the point that someone may be able to take over and only minor changes would be necessary to prepare the site to go live. At the same time, we started to begin thinking about how we may be able to provide a framework for this project to go forward and get our clients not only a functional website, but also a basic means to populate the social media to continue to raise awareness for the foundation online.
Our proposal
With the work we have done, we propose our efforts are continued by an interdisciplinary independent study. Specifically, we suggest a small, three to four person team of web developers and convergence students to assist our clients going forward. First, their goal should be developing whatever is necessary for the site to go live. Second, they should aim to improve two statistics: the number of unique visitors monthly, and the average time each visitor spends on the site. Achieving the first will require students to develop their knowledge of html coding and css styling. Achieving the second would require students to exercise professional social media practices and may also potentially include opportunities for students to work on promotional multimedia.
Reflections
Perhaps if someone asked us what we believed was accomplishable in 16 weeks, we would have assumed that much more would be possible. However, it seems our progress was slowed down by a few recurring issues. First, there was no firm step-by-step guide that we had to follow, and this made it difficult to know if our project was on track or not. Second, beginning from a limited knowledge domain, it was difficult for us to know whether our plan for going about solving our problem was the best one, given our situation. Finally, with a four group team, there was some difficulty in keeping every teammate on the same page and divvying out the workflow in a productive manner.