Strategy Blog: Viget Labs

Kevin Vigneault - Project Manager :

The heat map below is an attempt to visualize the current trend in banner advertising. It shows banner size and placement (highlighted in white) on 50 different popular sites. The brightest white areas are where banner ads were most frequently placed and the black areas are where no banner ads were displayed. The two red lines are 1,024 pixels apart to provide scale. Click here to view the heat map at full size.

 

Observations

 

• The most frequently used areas are along the top and right sides of the page.
• The most popular ad sizes are 728x90 Leaderboards and 300x250 Medium Rectangles.
• More sites place Leaderboards above the main navigation than below.
• Very few sites are placing banner ads along the left side of the page.
• The observed common placements do not match up very closely with Google's suggestions.

 

Methodology

 

At around 6:00 PM EST on 10/24/2008, I captured screenshots of the latest 50 articles posted in Digg.com’s content section, skipping any sites that did not contain banner ads and only counting each unique website once. The screenshots were then pulled into Photoshop, each as its own layer. Excluding the advertising areas, I removed all areas of the pages and filled the remaining advertising areas in solid white. Each layer was then set to ~95% transparency.

Stephanie Hay - Project Manager :

Since starting at Viget in February 2007, I've received a few requests from friends and clients who want to know what project management tools we use for tasking our teams. Also during that time frame, I've auditioned three different platforms, including Fog Creek Software's FogBugz,  Thoughtworks' Mingle, and now Unfuddle, whose features and flexibility seem most promising for our particular needs.

I should note that, before my time, we tried and abandoned XPlanner; same with Mantis.  Later, we even built our own tasking tool, Viget Labs Project Management (VLPM).  Ultimately, though, we learned that maintaining and building upon internal applications is unrealistic when paying clients have deadlines and expectations; so the search began for an external product that could support us (and, ideally, be customized as we grew and our needs changed).

Of course, each product we've tried has its pros and cons, which I describe here in my personal reviews (that's a disclaimer!).

Continue reading "Exploring Project Management Tasking Tools"

Kara Davis - Project Manager :

Dice, according to the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, are "small cubes of plastic, ivory, bone, or wood, marked on each side with one to six spots, usually used in pairs in games of chance or in gambling."

They also form the basis of online reviews in Norway. Some context:

"...the newspapers next morning, both locals and national seemed to give a careful "thumb's up," most of them landed the dice on four out of six eyes, I guess I was around that too?"
- from a Bob Dylan fan site

"JABULANI receives 5 and 6 on the dice from main newspaper"

I'd never encountered dice as a rating system before, but I have it straight from a good source that it is quite common in Norway, and I've found examples on several sites.

Continue reading "Rating Stuff in Norway"

Laura Dec - Project Manager :

Last month while attending the Web 2.0 Expo in New York City, Twitter was in full effect throughout the conference (as to be expected), however the most interesting use for me was that attendees were encouraged to tag their tweets within each track of the conference to help facilitate Q&A at the end of each session.  Attendees also often "seconded" others’ tweets on a topic they found an important one, which helped the most relevant topics bubble to the top. Speakers could keep an eye on the Twitter backchannel and answer audience members’ questions as the session went on or at the end. 

Similarly, I recently read this great article from academHacK on ways Twitter is being used in Academia to help students stay active and involved in class discussions. Some of the benefits he noted include continuing "class chatter" inside and outside of the classroom, developing a sense of community among classmates, and allowing professors to instantly reach and gather feedback from their students.

Continue reading "Using Twitter as a Tool"

Carolyn Hack - Project Manager :

As Viget Labs’ newest Project Manager, I’ve been learning the ropes here for the past couple of weeks. I spent my first week at HQ in Falls Church, Va., discussing Viget’s constantly evolving project processes and learning the finer points of Viget culture from my new team members. (It’s perfectly acceptable to make peanut butter sandwiches at your desk. I’m going to fit right in!)

After that initial week of guided training, I returned to Viget South in Durham, N.C., and continued learning on my own, reviewing successful web projects my colleagues have managed, asking questions about their experiences with different types of client engagements, and taking notes about techniques I admire or helpful tips they’ve given me. One of the things that impressed me was just how easy it was to go back and review those completed projects, even without the guidance of the project managers who saw them through to completion. Each past engagement was clearly documented with a set of deliverables, making it simple to follow the decisions the project team made at each stage of a web site’s life cycle.

One of the required reads for all Viget project managers is Dan M. Brown’s Communicating Design, which I’ve begun to read this week. Brown’s book encourages communication about web site planning and development using effective documentation. Since I’ve worked in user experience design for several years, none of the deliverables he describes are unfamiliar to me; but, it’s been interesting to compare some of his document creation and presentation techniques with Viget’s real-life examples.

Although Viget’s documentation varies based on the requirements, scope, and timeline for each web site, it’s always created for the same purpose:  keeping all project team members focused on the same goal. By clearly expressing user needs, site design, and strategy decisions made over the course of a project, good web site documentation also allows even uninvolved observers to understand the motivations for designing a site in a particular way, including or excluding features, or writing copy with a certain audience in mind.

Continue reading "Hello, World!"