Weight watchers
It began in the 60’s with one woman inviting her friends to her home once a week to talk about how to best lose weight. Today, Weight Watchers has helped educate, support and transform millions of people’s lives all over the world.
My Role: Front-end Developer
The Team: Me, Creative Directors, Information Architect, Project Manager, Designer, Developers & QA
The challenge: Code various new marketing landing pages to follow our updated branding aesthetic. Learn and implement Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.0) compliance into our process for the first time. The timeline was four weeks.
My role & approach: Early on we realized our CMS wasn’t built to handle quick updates without engineering support, which would slow us down significantly. So I worked with engineering to create new CMS tools to allow front-end developers the flexibility to update code on the fly. Using waterfall methodology, we worked with customers and other internal teams to strategize, using personas, journey mapping, user flows and user testing. As a front-end Developer I was responsible for taking a designers layouts and translating them into HTML, CSS and javascript. I worked with information architects and designers to review interactions and designs to figure out what was feasible within our timeline. I was now tasked with making our pages accessibile, which I was not too familiar with. Luckily for us, we hired a company to help educate some of our developers. I also spent time researching and asking questions on Twitter–to figure out how to best implement accessibility into our process. And sharing my learnings with my team.
The impact: As a result of creating the new CMS tools it gave front-end developers the ability to do things we were never able to do before. Later this also allowed our international sites to be able to make faster updates to their own websites too. And this freed up engineering during this process. We learned the difficulties in implementing accessibility into legacy systems. That it couldn’t be an afterthought in the process. That we need to unlearn bad design and development habits we were taught in school, but most importantly that we needed to get buy in from stakeholders to either reduce project scope or give us more time to implement. By testing the new pages we were able to remove 25% of the marketing sites pages that were no longer relevant to our visitors. We also saw a spike in visitors time on the site, which meant less people abandoning the site.
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