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– MY ROLES: CONTENT STRATEGIST, PROJECT MANAGER, DRUPAL DEVELOPER –

CHALLENGE

The Schroeder Institute needed a way to support their other channels and help people find and enroll in quit smoking studies.

APPROACH

The first step was to create stakeholder interview questions to get information like:

  • internal goals and objectives
  • target audiences
  • top tasks for audience members
  • desired perception of the organization
  • visual design preferences and dislikes

ORGANIZING THE SITE

I did competitive research, which confirmed the IA Schroeder’s in-house team thought would be most useful to potential study participants.

Next, I developed custom taxonomies covering:

  • study principals
  • types of studies
  • audience characteristics

These taxonomies would be the key to funneling participants to the correct studies early in the process.

DEVELOPING THE SITE

I developed the Drupal 7 site creating:

  • content types
  • fields
  • contexts and other back-end elements

These matched the needs discovered in the first phase of Rad Campaign’s waterfall project management process.

I led Rad Campaign staff through design review on wireframes and first round visual comps.

I also acted as a buffer between the in-house designer and Schroeder Institute staff. Part of my role was to translate the client’s feedback into understandable change requests for Rad Campaign’s design partner.

With desktop, tablet, and mobile comps approved, I finished back-end development and started on a custom theme.

The audience for study enrollment would need the site to work on mobile and tablet.

I started with Bootstrap to leverage its built-in mobile capabilities. This would set me up to deliver the best user experience to the site’s audience.

DELIVERABLES

As sole developer and project manager for this project, my deliverables included:

  • stakeholder interview documentation
  • competitive research analysis
  • project timeline with milestones, including internal review for deliverables due to the client
  • sitemap and navigation schema that accounted for recommendations from an SEO consultant
  • functional requirements document, which was the road map for back-end development
  • back-end Drupal customization including module installation, creation of views, contexts, taxonomies, and content types
  • graphic assets optimized for multiple platforms
  • custom SASS creating the interactive UI and custom theme based on Bootstrap

I created and delivered to Schroeder Institute staff basic training on content entry, publication, and management. I also created and delivered an advanced training on technical site management for Drupal.

IMPACT

The Schroeder Institute tobacco study enrollment portal had good SEO placement, often appearing in the top 10 results for searches via Google, DuckDuckGo, and Bing.