"I'm just sitting here watching the wheels go round and round. I like to watch them roll."

Wednesday, April 14, 2010

Planning Game on a Pool Table

I'm just back from a great Open Knesset meetup. There were seven of us, a pool table and lots of free goldstar beer (thanks to amir from goldstar) in the "Rosa Parks". It was great fun.


We came to play with planning. Our project, Open-Knesset, needs focus and the game delivered. We started with the wiki definition, the ideas of AgileZen and a pool table.


As the game progressed the table filled with cards. Well, the left side did, the right was left empty, opening room for empty thoughts.We decided to split: keep what's critical above the stick and what's important below it.


We left the table when we had our prime objective: Make our user go wow! and how to do it - serving a page that renders a glance at a Knesset Member. We cleared the table and focused on the information displayed on the member's page. At that time, someone wanted to play pool, so we moved to a side table, opened one laptop with balsamiq and wireframed the page.

I had no idea it would end there, a pleasant surprise.

Thanks to:

  • the ppl of the "Rosa Parks" for the place the service and the food
  • Amir from Goldstar for the free beer
  • The Great Maker

3 comments:

Tal Yaron said...

Hi Benny,
I wish I could come. Seems very intresting. Can you write what are the winning cards?

daonb said...

Next time, Tal.

Hadas has the cards, I'm sure she'll publish them soon.

ofri said...

Our winning topic were:

Wow factor and added value: user enters the site for whatever reason, and says wow, and feels that he is getting something he couldn't get anywhere else. The current focus is on showing and analyzing information about what happened in the knesset. in the (hopefully near) future, we will add call for action and ways to make a change.

The wow factor and added value are going to be achieved through:
- design: "Beautiful is better than ugly".
- MK at a glance: redesign the MK page, and add needed information so that a user looking at it can easily learn something new about the MK.
- - MK opinion on different topics
- - MK activity graph
- - MK activity stream
- - a screen wireframe will be sent soon
- Topic Maps: for each topic (tag), show the distribution of MKs according to their votes. (this wasn't designed yet).
- - To achieve this, we'll also need to finish tagging, probably through some simple auto tagging algorithm.

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About Me

Tel Aviv, Israel
Coder, Pythonist, Djangonaut, Hacker, Tel-Avivian and a free-radical-wanna-be