Wintercamp II - Day 1, Arriving
March 16, 2015
The second Wintercamp took place at Koppars on the 11-14 march 2015.
Feedback from last years’ Wintercamp was that we should decide and prepare some themes and projects prior to going up to Koppars.
So, when we, the 20 people from the Chicago, Stockholm, and London offices drove up to Koppars, there were six themes pre-baked and everyone felt roughly prepared for what was going to take place.
The idea behind Wintercamp is to unite people from all the offices and create, code, build, write, hang out, cook, and spend some time together outside of client projects.
There are no rules except :
- 1. We do Wintercamp stuff from 09.00-17.00 - even though it was really hard to get people away from the keyboards before 20.00 sometimes :-)
- 2. We do a short demo of the progress each day at 17.00.
We arrived at Koppars just outside Järvsö. The place is at the shore of river Ljusnan and consists of one main building and a few smaller. Once settled in we started off with lunch, a brief intro to all the themes.
Koppars is located just next to the Ljusnan river and it's a beautiful place in the wintertime.
Lunchtime day one.
Theme briefing
This is the pre-defined themes we wanted to dive deeper into at the wintercamp:
New Nansen.com
Initial wireframe for the news Nansen.com
This is the big one! It’s the most demanding theme since it will be the replacement of the current Nansen site that has existed for three years.
The goal was to leave Koppars with very, very well worked version 0.96 of the site. Everything had to be created from scratch.
GUI for Blueprint prototype tool
Proof of concept for the prototyping GUI is built in Umbraco.
Last year we refined and continued to build upon our prototype framework Blueprint. It is now in such a mature state that we have decided to try to build a graphical interface for it so that we UX:ers and designers can create prototypes without having to touch HTML and CSS.
NAPC 2015 conference app
Photo-feed in the NAPC conference app.
This is a theme initiated by the Chicago office. The idea is to dive into Xamarin, a framework where you build native apps for iOS, Android, Mac, and Windows, and build an app for our yearly internal Nansen NAPC conference. This year the conferance will be held in Chicago and will include staff from all our offices; Stockholm, London, New York and Chicago. The app will house travel information, speaker/session schedules, photo-stream so that the attendees can get the most out of the conferance.
Create templates for our new PRINCE2 project management process
The project management team has been working with our new project process Nansen NEXT. We are integrating the PRINCE2 project methodology with the agile development process. The work involves creating project management templates, and defining which work is done when.
"Concept" section for our client preview area
We have a Preview.nansen.com domain where our clients can login and access the visual design and prototypes that we build for them. But one thing that has been missing is a section where we can summarize concept and strategy for the clients projects. Goal is to get this in place.
Automatic style guides
We all love style guides! In a few projects we have drafted a style guide tool that automatically generates them for us from our LESS, SASS, or CSS files. At this Wintercamp it was time to refactor it, structure it a bit more seriously and integrate it more deeply with our Preview-area and the Blueprint framework.
