We kicked it off. We were working on this project following the agile development methodology. The workgroup consisted of leaders of nearly all areas of the organization, because changes on the homepage affected the entire company. The whole team were meeting on daily basis. We organized 51 meetings in total, plus dozens of smaller ad-hoc groups. And its easily double that number. The fact that Wirtualna Polska is based on two remote cities – Warsaw and Gdańsk — didn’t made it any easier.

We drew the first lines in Axure on 29 June, but it wasn’t very similar to our final project. The project had nearly 80 iterations. Several graphic designers worked on it simultaneously. In consequence webmasters and programmers worked on almost constantly transforming project. We weren’t even creating specification because it was pointless. Sometimes an element had changed twice a day, because something designed in the morning was no longer that attractive by the end of the day.

Various iterations of graphic design

During these two months, change was an immanent feature of our every workday. By the end of the project we were so used to it, that when I personally changed the central element of the homepage — the main topic — with just ten hours left to launch, the programmers just said „yeah, we’ll do it“. And its pretty weird if you know how developers usually react to sudden changes.

Our tempo was impressive. The whole mobile version of the site was created from scratch in just 20 hours, including all nuances of typography, responsiveness, breakpoints, java script transformations and the behaviour logic of the individual elements. Without a single line drawn in any graphic or UX software. All it took was some paper, a fair dose of mathematics, a great graphic designer and an exceptional webmaster. Like a real life hackathon.

In the same time our UX specialists went out to meet the users. We didn’t have time to organize stationary usertests, so we chose a quicker methodology: ambush guerilla user testing, invented by Andy Budd from The Guardian. To refresh your memory: the method involves testing prototypes ‘in the street’ through highly spontaneous interviews in city parks, shopping malls and coffee shops.

One of our designers decided to mix business with pleasure, and that’s how we conducted our first usertests on the beaches in Sopot and Gdańsk. We had nothing to show at the time, so we tested our old site. At the and of interview we asked our interviewees to describe Wirtualna Polska as if it was a human being. Lets see what our respondents said:

A guy in his late fourties, very formal

An old guy with no style, a miserable bore

An aged woman, a gossip who likes to talk a lot

And old stiff

We started to ask ourselves what will they say when we ask the same question after the launch of the new homepage? In other words: are we really going in the right direction?

I’m talking about these doubts, because we knew exactly how big was this revolution. The new homepage almost completely changed the long-established way of exploring our hompage. The division into the left magazine section and the right news section was replaeced by a division into horizontal topic sections, like news, finance, sport etc. We were planning to replace the sea of blue links with a grid of photographs and vibrant colours. To the current 20 photos on the page we were going to add an additional…few hundred. We removed most of the navigation items. We wanted to revolutionize not just the editorial parts, but also change the locations and forms of a large number of advertising formats.

Old and new design of homepage

Naturally, we were trying to limit the potential risk of error. With coming beta versions, we were conducting ad-hoc user tests. In total we ran four such series. We also managed to do several A/B tests on the old homepage. We tested the most controversial elements that we were planning to implement in the final project. This gave us the peace of mind that the company would not go bankrupt on 1 September, and we would not be fired.

However, we still had many questions that we couldn’t answer within those two months. Let me show you some examples.

Variations of right news column

As you can see we had many concepts for our right column. But which of them would be best? With mini pictures or without them? With blue links, or with black?

We also wanted to choose the best navigation layout.

Variations of header

But which one will be working best? Red? White? With fewer or more links? With links on the right or on the left? What about the right column — is it better with more pictures or not? Should the weather be on the header or would it work better in the right column? What about the main topic? What about the left column with the colour cables? Will they work better with photos or without them? And the automotive section — perhaps it should be above, not below the women’s section?

But there came the launch date, and all these questions remained unanswered.