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Protect The Human’s new Actions pages now live
Following on from my last post about PTH’s Campaigns pages, the new Actions pages are now live as well. Together they make for a much improved user experience, not to mention how much better they look. Our hope is that this inspires more people to campaign for human rights. A huge thank you to Julia, Paul Sims, Oli and our development partners New Bamboo for their work on this.
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Protect The Human new homepage
Following up on Tim’s recent post on the new Protect The Human homepages, I’m going to write about the process I went through to create the final homepage designs.
1. Sketching
I started with sketches. Sketching ideas on the paper helped me visualize quickly what we wanted to achieve through the new homepages and how we wanted to address current site’s issues.
It was an easy way to present the initial ideas to people involved in the project (client, creative director, developer, etc.), and made it easy to apply any changes required. It was also much quicker than creating the initial visuals in photoshop!
2. Creating ‘grey boxes’ in photoshop
After the sketching session I had a clear idea how to present both logged in and logged out homepage objectives. I knew the content that should go on the pages and I could start playing with it in photoshop.
I started with laying out grey content boxes on the page, creating the grid, and showing the hierarchy.
Logged in homepage
Logged out homepage
3. Designing
The next step was to start the design. I did several versions of the homepage before achieving the final one. However, the previous two steps saved a lot of my time and made the actual design process less frustrating.
Here are the final designs:
Logged out homepage
Logged in homepage
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On the logged in homepage, for users who have only just registered and are new to Protect The Human, there is a set of 3 automatic, time-based actions suggested for them to take:
Once user starts taking actions this panel changes to suggest personalized actions:
‘Recent highlights’ panel becomes also personalized (Highlights for you) once user has specified interests. It displays the content based on user’s chosen tags and campaigns.
I’ve also created two templates for the feature area so that Amnesty has the flexibility to choose the type of content they want to show. They highlight crucial events, campaigns, etc., and urge the user to take action.
Video template
Image Gallery template
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Overall, I did truly enjoy the whole design process. Simple things like sketching can make the whole design process so much easier.
More improvements to the site will follow as we’re currently working on them.
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News: new release of Amnesty’s ProtectTheHuman.com
We’ve made a new release of ProtectTheHuman.com, the social media campaigning platform and activism community we launched for Amnesty UK in August 2008.
This latest release introduces:
- a new logged-out home page designed to optimise sign-up
- a souped-up logged-in home page that provides more personalised content and better signposting to activity throughout the site
- a new global ‘eyebrows and beard’ navigation set at the top and bottom of the page – designed to make it easier for users to move between Amnesty’s network of sites
- closer integration with the Protect The Human blog, to reflect its growing role as the ‘voice’ at the heart of the community
- Twitter to the home page, as a link at this stage, but reflecting the ever-increasing importance of Amnesty UK’s Twitter network as a campaigning platform woven through just about all activity on and off-site at Protect The Human
The combined effect of these changes is to create a more joined-up experience, and to make it easier for site users to discover and carry out online actions in support of Amnesty’s campaigns.
But that’s not all. Another push in the next couple of weeks will see the deployment of Facebook Connect integration that will make it even easier to sign up, and take campaigning at Protect The Human inside Facebook. And Julia and Paul have started working on some changes to tighten up and optimise the Campaigns and Actions sections of the site and the way these interactions work.
Well done to Julia and Oli for their design and front-end skills, as well as to our dev partners New Bamboo. Big shout to Amnesty’s Web team as well (especially Sara, Fiona, Sam, Aggie, Ben and Vero). We’ve all worked as one team on this project. I know Julia wants to write a post about the process we followed.
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New release of Amnesty’s ProtectTheHuman.com
We’ve made a new release of ProtectTheHuman.com, the social media campaigning platform and activism community we launched for Amnesty UK in August 2008.
This latest release introduces:
- a new logged-out home page designed to optimise sign-up
- a souped-up logged-in home page that provides more personalised content and better signposting to activity throughout the site
- a new global ‘eyebrows and beard’ navigation set at the top and bottom of the page – designed to make it easier for users to move between Amnesty’s network of sites
- closer integration with the Protect The Human blog, to reflect its growing role as the ‘voice’ at the heart of the community
- Twitter to the home page, as a link at this stage, but reflecting the ever-increasing importance of Amnesty UK’s Twitter network as a campaigning platform woven through just about all activity on and off-site at Protect The Human
The combined effect of these changes is to create a more joined-up experience, and to make it easier for site users to discover and carry out online actions in support of Amnesty’s campaigns.
But that’s not all. Another push in the next couple of weeks will see the deployment of Facebook Connect integration that will make it even easier to sign up, and take campaigning at Protect The Human inside Facebook. And Julia and Paul have started working on some changes to tighten up and optimise the Campaigns and Actions sections of the site and the way these interactions work.
Well done to Julia and Oli for their design and front-end skills, as well as to our dev partners New Bamboo. Big shout to Amnesty’s Web team as well (especially Sara, Fiona, Sam, Aggie, Ben and Vero). We’ve all worked as one team on this project. I know Julia wants to write a post about the process we followed.
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Case study: Amnesty UK ‘Campaigning with Social Media’
Made by Many has worked with Amnesty UK since January ‘08, and helped them design and build ProtectTheHuman.com – their digital activism community. ProtectTheHuman.com is a social platform that asks users to carry out a range of online actions in support of Amnesty’s campaigns, and to upload video and photos and bookmark content from all over the Web.
You can read more about it here – in Charlotte’s blog post when the site launched. And you can also read about how Amnesty have used Protect The Human to campaign against the proposed extension of detention without trial to 42 days, and in support of US death row prisoner Troy Davis.
Since just before Christmas we’ve been working with Amnesty UK’s web team on a project to optimise the use of external social media services. This involved an audit, mapping and optimisation exercise of all official (Amnesty-run) and supporter-run groups and pages on Flickr, YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Bebo and blogs. We then followed this with planning for specific campaigns: Obama’s First Hundred Days and End Violence Against Women.
The case study below provides some real data (often missing in social media case studies) that shares what we all did and how well it worked. Please take it, share it, use it, re-tweet it and spread it all over the place. We also have some exciting new releases to make to the main Protect The Human website in the next few weeks, and another case study (Obama’s First 100 Days) to share.
Campaigning with social mediaView more presentations from madebymany. -
We love Mixwit
We’ve been having a lot of fun with Mixwit recently. We did one for Metrotwin – a mixtape based on places in New York to match one that was done by one of Metrotwin’s blogging contributors Wee Birdy for London. Now we’ve gone and done one for our client Amnesty International UK to celebrate the 60th Anniversary of the UN Declaration of Human Rights.
Please suggest any other suitable songs/tracks in the comments area below.
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Protect The Human success re ‘No’ to 42 days
Great news for civil liberties in our green and pleasant land: MPs have dropped their plans to extend detention without trial to 42 days.
This is in no small part due to the relentless efforts of Amnesty International UK and its supporters to highlight the issue with a national petition, and to encourage voters in 20 constituencies whose MPs were undecided on the issue that this is not something the British people want.
Protect The Human garnered a staggering 9,503 signatures for the “Say ‘No’ to 42 days!” petition. Online campaigning in action. If you haven’t seen the video produced by Dark Fibre with music from the Orb and voiceover by Christopher Eccleston (erstwhile Dr Who), go and take a look.
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Amnesty’s ‘Protect The Human’ on BoingBoing – save Troy Davis
This lunchtime saw one of the first big pushes for Protect The Human in the wider web – our friends at Amnesty are raising awareness via BoingBoing of the plight of Troy Davis, condemned to death for a murder he maintains he did not commit.
It’s very exciting to see how the PTH platform gives Amnesty the tools it needs to quickly respond to issues as and when they arise – clemency was denied to Troy Davis a matter of days ago and with the potential to gather support from across the web using PTH to push out to Facebook, digg, delicious and others, Amnesty supporters could make the difference to obtain a total stay of execution.
Follow the conversation on Protect The Human, and take a five minute action to save a man’s life.
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Protect The Human
Our latest release, Protect The Human, a social campaigning platform developed for Amnesty International’s UK division, marks an important milestone in Made by Many’s life. It’s nearing our first birthday and on the back of the private beta release of Metrotwin, we quietly released Protect The Human to the world on Tuesday.
Today is the first day that the wider world’s attention will be drawn to Protect The Human as it sees the release of tickets for Amnesty’s Secret Policeman’s Ball and the announcement from the High Court that evidence from Guantanamo prisoner Binyam Mohamed is admissible in his case to escape the death penalty. His case has been highlighted by Amnesty’s Individuals at Risk campaign for the past few years. (You can help raise awareness of his plight by taking action on Protect The Human.)
The juxtaposition of these two events is classic Amnesty: the tricky balance of important human rights issues with the lighter side of life; and Made by Many, in collaboration with our Ruby on Rails development partner New Bamboo, are very proud to have played a part in helping Amnesty get the message out to the wider population.
We worked very closely with Amnesty to define their online campaigning needs and ambitions before entering into a period of service definition to flesh out exactly what the site would do and how. The close relationship with Amnesty and New Bamboo continued throughout the project’s design and development. We’re looking forward to the future as Amnesty’s commitment to the web as an additional campaigning channel grows.
The site was built over an intensive 3-month period using Agile project, design and development methodologies (more of which we’ll reveal in a future blog post) and in true Agile style, the site will continue to be improved with iterative releases. Keep an eye on the site (and this blog) for release of more features over the coming weeks.
So what can you do on Protect The Human? Well, you can share, comment on and bookmark content from around the web to spread the word about human rights issues that matter to you.
And you can show your support by contributing the smallest action. What we’re aiming to do is to encourage more people to get involved with human rights without banging the drum and coming over all heavy-handed.
Your contribution can be as quick as a comment on a video, gallery or bookmark you’ve seen on Protect The Human. Or you could send it to a friend. For anyone who wants to spend a little more time, users can add their own bookmarks, create their gallery of images or upload a video relating to human rights.
We anticipate that the site will significantly contribute to Amnesty UK’s target to engage with 1 million people by 2011.
Stay tuned for a case study on the project with more detail on how we worked together with both Amnesty and New Bamboo.
Posts Tagged ‘Amnesty’
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