The technical requirements: The navigation menu was one of the complex components that became simpler with a modular approach. The site design called for a static frame for the menu and a second frame for the content itself. The static frame was required because the menu was a complex Flash widget and the designers didn't want the users to reload this on every page. The menu would also have be intelligent enough to read Javascript calls from the content frame — and determine which menu elements were related to that content. A user could directly load up any page in the site and the menu would reconfigure itself appropriately to reflect the proper state.
The scope was complicated by cross-sectional pieces of content as well. The Flash menu had a simple interface with the content, but it was a complicated piece of software to implement. We couldn't afford to wait for it to be functional before moving ahead with development and testing. Much of the work we had to do required a navigation menu. We needed to quality control things like content groupings, labels, etc. So what did we do? Our usual approach to mocking up a temporary implementation of a forthcoming component worked appropriately here. We designed the menu to configure itself from a nav structure defined in XML. Then we created a dev version of the menu that was based on the same XML source, and rendered as a long, static tree of links (ugly and not user friendly but good for the developers). The Flash "menu" branch was free to move forward at its own pace and would be able to drop into the main branch whenever ready.
The results
With these modular approaches to development process and software design, we were able to distribute and complete the vast amount of content production. The project went so well that Coca Cola cancelled their plans to transition this to an internal team and engaged us to continue with the development and maintenance of the application. We continue to serve Coca Cola today as they move forward with new innovations and designs.
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