Agile project management

Planning a wedding, even a small one is like adding another full-time job to your already busy life. To help make sense of the sheer amount of work ahead of us, I introduced my then fiancée to some principles of agile project management using the Trello app.

To the un-indoctrinated here is a rundown of our process:

We map out all the work that needs to get done and prioritize it based on importance and time sensitivity (prioritized backlog). Each week we pulled pieces of work from the top of the backlog and made a commitment to how much work we can get done (Weekly sprint). Each day we reviewed what we did the day before, what we will be doing and if there are any impediments (Daily scrum). At the end of the week, we talk about how that week went and if there are areas that needed improvement (Retrospectives). It worked brilliantly.

Having a retrospective with your significant other should always take place in a dimly lit room with candles, drinking scotch.

Our Trello board for the final sprint before the wedding.

Google drive served a crucial role. All our files including contracts, images, and forms were uploaded to a shared docs folder for easy access. A master spreadsheet was created that tracked budget, RSVPs, seating arrangements, schedule, etc.; We reviewed and updated it obsessively.

The combination of Trello and Google drive kept us on track and ensured we met the deadlines we set for ourselves without making our lives miserable. Both work well on mobile devices so you can always have access to your information when you need it.

Unified design and branding

A byproduct of building many large commercial websites and web applications is a great deal of exposure to the design process. Having a universal design language for the wedding was extremely important. We wanted a consistent look and feel from start to finish. Whether it be our email correspondence or our labels on the parting gifts; everything should be consistent.

I am lucky enough to have a friend who happens to be a brilliant designer and user experience specialist. Even luckier is that he needed his own wedding website built at around the same time so we established a quid pro quo arrangement.

Everything was treated as if it were a professional engagement. We met regularly to discuss requirements, build concepts, and provide feedback on mockups and comps.

The most important design requirement was established early on by my fiancée. Cats needed to play a prominent role in any design moving forward.

Early ideas for colour, fonts, and style all involving cats by Andrew Semuschak

Key assets including logos, colours and fonts were quickly established and general templates were built for print and email correspondence. This was by far one of the most important things we could have done for our wedding. Everything falls into place once the design and colour scheme are established.

100% email correspondence

We didn’t want to send invitations via snail mail. Dealing with the RSVP overhead alone was something I was not looking forward to. We decided to harvest all our invitees’ email addresses and correspond almost exclusively by Email.

We used MailChimp (Mail… Kimp?) to send our emails because of their easy template management, cross email client testing, opens and click tracking, and adding segmentation identifiers such as RSVP status.

Our official email invitation design by Andrew Semuschak

The free tier MailChimp account fit our needs nicely. What surprised us the most was how few people had issues receiving the messages. Thanks to the tracking features we were able to identify those who hadn’t opened the email and follow up with them directly.

Modern wedding website

Let’s be honest; most wedding websites are awful. Ours had to be awesome as a matter of principle. It needed to be responsive, informative, easy to use, and reflect our sense of humour. You can see the final result here (http://www.singlahabib.com)

Layout wireframe by Andrew Semuschak

From a technical perspective, it was a single page static HTML document built using modern front end build processes which at the time including the use of grunt, sass, and the foundation framework. It was a great little project to learning the processes and tooling.

I spent a great deal of time on scrolling performance. Many long single page sites suffer from poor scrolling frame rates. Using GPU enhanced CSS techniques I keep our frame rate close to 60fps even on mobile devices.

A custom RSVP form was built and the submissions were sent to us via email. An “If this then that” (IFTTT) recipe was built to transfer the contents of the email into our master Google spreadsheet.

Once the RSVP deadline arrived, we closed the submission functionality and repurposed the buttons into a table finder utility which allowed our guests to quickly look up which table they were assigned to.

My favourite part of the website was the presentation of our relationship factoids. We shamelessly used the character of Pusheen the cat and had her peek out from the sides of the page at various points. If clicked, Pusheen would pop out and spill the beans. Feel free to check out the site and try it for yourself.

Pusheen revealing our secrets

Statistical analysis of relationship through SMS history

My wife and I text a lot. I thought it would be really interesting to see if we could get some statistical insight into our relationship based on our text history. Thankfully my wife had our entire relationship on her phone. I used a third-party tool to extract the data then put it into a MySQL database and run queries against it to gather as many interesting and absurd metrics as I could find.

E.g. In the first month we knew each other, we messaged 3208 times.

My friend designed a three-page illustration which acted as a comedic narrative of poorly interpreted statistical data. The illustrations were printed and placed around the venue during the reception. Not only was it something people hadn’t seen before, but it gave everyone something to talk about.