This document seeks to outline the rest of the calendar year of 2016 starting the first of June. Prior to June, the systems team has launched a new giving platform, NewSpring accounts, helped to launch Rock, and shipped a brand new internally built native app to iOS and Android.
Each project listed will be an epic with a description, an estimated timeline, estimated man power budget, and the business value the project brings. Each project will be tested (user and/or automated), documented, and has time allotted after shipping for bug fixes and needed immediate improvements. Doing this expands each projects traditional “development” time by a factor of three.
With the incredible power of Rock workflows out our hand, we want to allow for a more immersive and easy way for our users to take their next step. Through improvements to our GraphQL application, we can dynamically create workflows forms on the fly for our end user. Joined with our authentication system, we can pre-fill as many fields as possible for the user. These will initially be possible on all Apollos powered sites (native app and my.newspring.cc). This project will also include the initial build of Apollos that can live on any site through an embed link. The idea behind this is all of our Expression Engine powered sites can being to embed workflows along side the vision behind taking a next step. These would not be modals, but rather live as a traditional element on the page. With shared authentication coming to EE later this year, at one point in time, these forms will power signing in to apollos / rock via newspring.cc and add the ability to pull user data on EE powered sites.
- I would like this project to be joined with the operations team building out block support for this embed script so all our our site families can get the benefit at launch.
- These forms would also be able to live on publications platforms like medium.com and other sites as needed.
Timeline: 2 months
Resources Needed: 1 senior developer and one developer
Business Value: Next steps through workflows are now available on all platforms inline. This will result in a much higher conversion rate for forms, and begin the process of unifying our user experience across all applications.
Developer Value: This project paves the way for the migration off of EE and onto Rock / Apollos. It allows the improvements we make for apollos project’s to be available to EE on shipping in most cases.
In order to unify our design language and user experience, we need a universal pattern library and style guide. This project will include both developer focused, and designer focused tooling to keep our code and designs in sync as well as robust browser testing to ensure components work everywhere. Missing patterns from the EE family of sites, as well as Rock, will be designed and incorporated into this library. Code snippets will be available for copy and paste into applications.
- This project is the largest step towards moving the ability to work in Apollos and Rock to the operations team. It will also empower the designer on operations to build excellent experiences with little to no new code.
Timeline: 2 months
Resources: 1 senior designer and one developer
Business Value: This project will greatly reduce UI/UX failings and make development of new features / pages much faster.
Developer Value: This project will allow for more thought and time to be put into what we are building for our users, instead of building new pieces. With a sketch pattern library, as well as code snippets, our team will be able to build uniformly better products at a faster rate.
The initial app launch of our native app will be a Cordova wrapper around web views using reactjs for rendering. It will be a good app, but with React Native, we will be able to make it tremendously better. React Native will also allow us to target natively all major OS’s (iOS, Android, Windows (all sizes), OS X, and even tvOS. We can also move our web code to use react native allowing for a universal development language built on top of React. This sets us up for massive performance improvements down the road in our applications and keep us at the forefront of the developer community.
Timeline:: 2 months
Resources: 1 senior developer
Business Value: Much more performant native applications, increased shipping points for apps. NewSpring on every device, natively.
Developer Value : Unified development practices for all target platforms while still building native application code. Keep us in community spotlight as an outstanding developer team
Currently our users interact with NewSpring online in one of four places. They can interact on live.newspring.cc, newspring.cc, my.newspring.cc and rock.newspring.cc. These are all different applications but our to our users, are just NewSpring. With the launch of the NewSpring account, unifying these platforms to use the same account and sign in method will provide clarity to our users, and more avenues for us to care for them.
The goal of this project is ambitious but possible. Ideally, a signing to rock.newspring.cc, newspring.cc, my.newspring.cc or live.newspring.cc will sign you in on all platforms at once. We can access user data from all of these sites as well allowing us to make our sites more personal little by little. With this change, we also want to add {Person.firstName} type tags to EE for the logged in person.
Timeline:: 3 months
Resources: 1 senior developer, 1 developer
Business Value: Universal accounts on all platforms allows us to start reaching our people on a more personal level. It massively expands the EE platform without splitting user base or building complex syncing systems. It also could evolve into allow NewSpring Network people and accounts to live in Rock.
Developer Value: Universal accounts + GraphQL means more and more that every line of code we write, will be able to reach our people on all of our platforms. Things like embedding give now or even group chat become possible on newspring.cc until the move to Rock + Apollos is complete. It theoretically could expand the lifespan of EE by 3 years.
Now that we are finally on the path to a universal design language, we need to design better experiences and layout types for different pages. Much like our component library, these layouts seek to exist as a starting point to create great user experiences with user testing, research, and analytics backing the choices made. The resulting product will be a set of layout styles and outlines that are suited for feature content pages (newspring.cc/, newspring.cc/easter), for static content pages (newspring.cc/baptism, newspring.cc/about), for dynamic content (newspring.cc/sermons/, newspring.cc/articles/), and for application style pages (my.newspring.cc/give/now, my.newspring.cc/profile)
- With these patterns in place, the operations team can iterate and experiment with patterns and layouts to make dynamic and powerful user experiences.
Timeline: 2 months
Resources: 1 senior designer
Business Value: More dynamic and better designed user experiences across all sites as well as increased efficiency in design and development. With these patterns content editors, non technical designers, and non design focused developers can make great products.
Developer Value: More intricate page level features are developed by the systems team (interactive gallery for instance) and our sites have a more consistent experience for our users. This does not mean every page will look the same, but rather every person will be familiar with how to engage a page based on its purpose. It also allows us to test our layouts for conversions and CTAs to determine if they are effective.
Community is a big part of the Christian experience. With the launch of connect for groups, and the native app, we are primed and ready for an explosion of online enhanced groups and community. This project will be the first major step towards that. It will include the way to create and manage online communities, as well as share existing NewSpring resources and send non-live communication. It will have all of the features of the group leader toolbox in Rock, consolidating more actions into the app / my.newspring.cc. This project is huge as it also is the foundation for topics / tags and how people search for others online at NewSpring.
There is a lot more to this project than written here, but its awesome.
Timeline:: 6 months
Resources: Entire systems team
Business Value: Create a home for community online. Allow people to connect and have relationships in a deeper level enhanced by technology. It also allows staff to know the pulse of our community through Rock. How we do community is the foundation for how we do online courses and education, campus specific content / actions, and much more. It serves NewSpring and NewSpring Network as church leaders can be in groups and share resources / communicate.
Developer Value: If we aren’t at 50,000 accounts yet, this will greatly push us over that amount. It also gets us one step further towards tailored accounts and real time usage of the NewSpring app by our people.
This project seeks to enhance the work done on community 1.0 by adding real time communication to the app and sites. It will also include development of push notifications and a way to send them from user to user and staff to user.
Timeline: 2 months
Resources: Entire Systems Team
Business Value: Increased usage of sites and applications. It could theoretically be used for all staff communication as well.
Developer Value: This will require reactive data which puts us at the forefront of the developer world again as we create reactive GraphQL with Meteor. Also, emoticons and emoji reaction for our people :tad:
7 months
Senior Developer: 12.25 months
James Baxley: 7 X .75 = 5.25
John Pinkerton: 7 X 1 = 7
Senior Designer: 8.75 months
James Baxley: 7 X .25 = 1.75
Sam Claridge: 7 X 1 = 7
Developer: 14 months
Ben Wiley: 7 X 1 = 7
Drew Delianides: 7 X 1 = 7
Senior Developer: 2.75 months
Senior Designer: 3.25 months
Developer: 9 months
As you can see from the deficit, we won’t be able to launch all of these products this year without more developers or pushing back projects.