Navigation for Wise Scout - A blog about our online adventures while creating our job board - April, 2007

Everyone can estimate to some degree. When planning more agile like development I use a little process that has worked for me in the past, I don’t profess to be an expert on the area but they may be useful to you

A. Ask each team member to estimate their next task ahead, just focusing on the functions you need for this deliverable. Note: don't start talking about your possible plans in 12 months, they don't need to know, you have the strategic view of where its going they work on the now, the tactical aspects of the jobs, if you feel the need to perhaps agile development is the wrong way for you, hop onto a more waterfall based approach and get your architecture sorted up front to support all of the possibilities.

B. Monitor how long it actually took.

C. repeat a and b until you get the personal multiplier, this is a measure of how much they over or under estimate by, this gives you a stake in the ground.

D. optionally apply your own difficulty multiplier feeling if you have enough understanding of the problem/solution domain.

Be aware over time each person may automatically adjust their estimates to bring them in line with what they can actually achieve, this experience is usually within the project they are working. So keep a record of this.

The site will be based around the Freemium model. Offer a useful set of features to all users for free and then additional features that are worth a financial commitment from those who require them. The features suit the regular professional recruiters and larger employers who will be using the site regularly. The free features are designed for the occasional recruiter who needs a simple way of getting jobs seen. I have always had a target figure in my head for numbers of users and expected revenue, but they are all shots in the dark for now. I need to carry out a bit of research into the value of these additional services. In addition to this we will use a few different types of ads, starting with Google Ads.

More work on the paper prototypes, took yesterdays ideas and created a tidied up version. Scanned into a PDF and sent on to development. This will aid much clearer conversations than the text spec I put together. We should be able to get cracking on some of the harder location based parts of the application now we know how it should look.

Started the first iteration of the profile pages for the contractor users, paper prototyping is the only quick and effective way of getting the design right. Lots of people have gone to great depths to explain the concept so I won’t repeat their work here. One part I never hear people talk about is the ability to capture the drawings directly onto a computer using a desktop tablet or tablet pc. I have used an HP TC1100 (ebay has quite a few under £500) for about two years and used the tablet capability quite a lot, mostly when capturing ideas and drawings of things I know I want to share with other people. One Note  is consistently good for this job and really does a sterling job at converting my messy handwriting. The export to mht option grabs all of the bits together so you can send it on as one file, some email clients don't like mht but you can zip it first. The other option which I used for this project was to draw and scan the interfaces out, drawing the multiple states of the page where necessary.