For a while now I’ve been wanting to do a “behind the scenes” series of posts where we showing how we work, but most of our projects are either sensitive in nature, or just too large to do without making it a 200 part series. I was also following along last week as the team at Carsonified.com whipped up a simple ASP.NET MVC app. I thought this was particularly interesting to follow since these guys are usually a Ruby shop.
Anyhow, since I’m just starting to build GeoGeekTV.com, I thought this was as good an opportunity as any.
The Goal
As nice as UStream.tv is, I’d rather like to have better “experience” for GeoGeekTV.com. I still want to keep is really simple, but just make it a little smoother to locate archive shows, and to see what we have upcoming. We also want to have a consistent location to watch the “live” stream.
Wireframes
To start off, I fired up Basalmiq (full disclosure – they hooked me up with a license if I blogged about it – I’ll do a specific post in it’s pros and cons another time). In the past I’ve used Visio for developing wireframes, but the tendency there is to get too involved in making it look “real”. For me at least, wireframes are more about figuring out the basic interaction model – how is the information organized, and how does a user navigate it. I’m not worrying so much about colors and fonts. Baslsamiq helps with this because it looks hand-drawn. This seems to help people focus on the flow instead of the looks.
Here’s the initial cut at the UI
Ok, so I did play with photoshop today and throw in a quickie site header, but you get the idea.
Keepin it “Agile”
In the past I’ve talked a lot about agile practices, so in keeping with that I’ll be keeping track of user stories and tasks at Scrumy.com. You can see the project by heading to http://www.scrumy.com/geogeektv but the screen cap below pretty much sums it up.
Basically this is just a digital version of sticky notes. Since this is the free version, I think anyone can change or move things around, but please don’t 
Also – since this is a side project, I’m not really working in “sprints” per-se – I’m just doing tasks as I have time – I *hope* to have this all up and running for the next conference we attend (GIS in the Rockies).
Moving Forward
I’ll be working on furthering the design and graphics over the next week, and then I’ll start on the coding. I’m going to be using ASP.NET MVC v2 (beta) because I want to play with the nifty new bits, and I may use this as an opportunity to mix a little Fluent NHibernate into my bag o tricks as well. I’m going to throw the code up on Assembla, so anyone will be able to peek inside.
