The shape of the WSAD alpha

By clustering and prioritising our user needs and considering the project’s most important objectives, a few important areas have emerged:

• Focus on young people, skills and new audiences - interesting, unique, inspiring stories which convey key WorldSkills messages, connecting WorldSkills to the world (both school and jobs), etc
• Using Facebook as a testing ground for content and creating a dashboard to show important metrics.
• Building tools or story formats so the WSAD team can create interesting and exciting new content after the website has launched.

We mapped out these areas to show the shape of the alpha:

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Focus on young people, skills and new audiences

The skills layout will be very important. There will be a layout for skills at worldskillsabudhabi2017.com/skills and each skill will sit beneath that, eg worldskillsabudhabi2017.com/skills/mobile-robotics 

The exemplar skills for the alpha will be Mobile Robotics and Landscape Gardening because both are pretty visual and both have stronger UAE presence. We will start designing, building and testing ideas with these skills experimenting with possible content, stories and formats.

Competitors are also vital. All the competitors will be available at worldskillsabudhabi2017.com/competitors and each competitor will sit beneath that, eg worldskillsabudhabi2017.com/competitors/competitor (either name or ID). Admittedly there’s over a thousand competitors, which will be a challenge to represent visually but by treating them separately from teams we can highlight individuals. Also the competitor lists will not be available for a while, so the worldskillsabudhabi2017.com/competitors can be a home for inspiring stories of former competitors, ways to get involved and other approaches to encourage involvement.

The teams will sit worldskillsabudhabi2017.com/countries. We’re not sure we can use countries, but it does seem a good way to clarify what teams are. Each country will sit beneath that worldskillsabudhabi2017.com/countries/uae

All of these layouts will be interlinked so a competitor will be part of team and be competing in a skill. 

We will also work on a layout for worldskillsabudhabi2017.com/get-involved which will include competing, volunteering, jobs, partnerships and other opportunities.

Other possible areas include what is WorldSkills, the venue, the conference and results, but we will work on these after the core areas of the site have started to form.

Facebook as a testing area

Facebook needs to be the testing area for all content, ideas and experiments with tone and voice. We need to ask ourselves who will share something and why? Then we need to test it: post it to Facebook, see shares, likes and comments and use that knowledge to improve. 

Dashboard for key metrics

We need to establish the core metrics early on - trustworthy measures of whether we are achieving what we want to achieve. With this in mind, an important early development could be a dashboard which feeds in Facebook data, Twitter data, Google Analytics, mail analytics and more.

One of the aims is finding what resonates with the WorldSkills “tribes” and encouraging them to tell our story. Each experiment with form, content and medium needs to be tested and measured (using the dashboard and the core metrics) and then get revised and improved - add, test, tweak, optimise, remove, etc. 

By establish this dashboard and these metrics early in the project, we can encourage this approach throughout the lifecycle of the website.

Building tools or alternative story formats

The competition is over a year and a half away. Lots of content will be created after this website project has ended. By developing tools, such as timelines, maps and lists, we will provide ways for the WSAD team to create the stories they want to create in an appropriate and exciting format. Obviously we aren’t going to spend time making stuff that we don’t need and everything will be based on evidence, but this approach to creating tools helps us overcome the problem of developing the website so far in advance of the competition.