Birmingham Children’s Hospital website / mobile project

Digital Life Sciences / Illumina Digital was commissioned to develop and deliver new look and features for Birmingham Children’s Hospital website and to enhance the experience for its mobile users. The adaptive design will help thousands of visitors who browse the website using their mobile devices. As a part of the project a news section was delivered for both desktop and mobile users too.

Scope

- Home page redesign (desktop)
- Completely new mobile home page
- Adaptive design for two widths – desktop and mobile friendly
- News section as a part of the website
- Homepage slideshow
- Couple of other improvements

Team

I managed a team of designer, frontend coder, backend developer and the client provided a product owner who also did external Q/A, and sign-off.

Methodology and how the project was delivered

It was decided to go fully Agile and use SCRUM with short (7 days sprints) – total of 5 sprints was agreed.  A backlog with 20 items was produced and prioritised. The product owner re-prioritised the items after every sprint ending on a sprint planning meeting.  We managed to deliver slightly ahead of the schedule and the 5th sprint was only used for final deployment. The daily scrums with the product owner (over phone) proved to be efficient in reporting, testing and signing off items quickly. As it is a Drupal website we had to create several new content types and functionalities as well as modifying the existing template.

Major issues/challenges

- Producing an adaptive design for all the mobile phones proved to be a difficult task. We decided to focus on the latest iOS and Android devices. Some of the javascript galleries still won’t work an all devices (especially very old ones).
- At several points we were running ahead of schedule and had to pull out/agree on items from the backlog.
- Had to cover a frontend developer for a few days. It was good that the backend developer and I managed to cover.
- The deployment was tricky as it is a major website.

Delivered result

The home page and the slideshow could be reviewed at:
https://www.bch.nhs.uk/

The news section is located and could be seen here:
https://www.bch.nhs.uk/news

The mobile adaptive design could be accessed from mobile phones. Here is a sample picture of it: