Confluence Screenshot tour
Case Study – Night Kitchen Interactive
- Location
- Philadelphia, PA, USA
- Industry
- Interactive design
- # of employees
- 15
- Types of clients using the wiki
- Pharmaceuticals, non-profit arts and cultural organisations and research institutes
- Key customisations
- Zones macro, metadata macro
A conversation with Juan Leon, Senior Consultant at Night Kitchen Interactive
Night Kitchen Interactive is an award-winning design firm located in Philadelphia's historic Society Hill. An Atlassian Partner, Night Kitchen spearheaded the National Constitution Center's Constitution Day wiki. This innovative project involved redesigning Confluence.
Tell us a little bit about Night Kitchen Interactive.
We create online learning, interactive exhibits, and marketing communication solutions for large corporate clients in many industries. In the not-for-profit sector, we do a great deal of work with museums, such as the Smithsonian, smaller non-profits, and research institutes.
One thing special about our company is that, in working with both corporate and not-for-profit clients, we try to bring the best of both worlds together. Our corporate clients have driven a lot of our work with Web 2.0 technologies, like wikis. They were curious early on, and they funded projects with those tools. In the museum world, our clients are more partial to a storytelling, narrative approach. These days, we often combine the two. For example, we develop knowledge collaboration sites for corporate clients that use storytelling and narrative, which provides a lot of benefits. And with the National Constitution Center, we used a wiki. So there's a synergy there.
So you're building wiki-based sites for all types of clients?
Yes, we use Confluence for clients in all of our main areas of business: for-profit, museums, and research institutes. We have built several wikis in each category and we're adding more every month. A year ago, we were really promoting this kind of tool. Now people might say, "We want a wiki," or "We're looking for a site that allows for a lot of participation and a lot of collaboration," which is a wiki.
- "We were looking for a wiki that was truly enterprise- caliber, and Confluence turned out to be the one." Juan Leon, Night Kitchen Interactive
Why did you choose Confluence over the other wikis?
After attending a learning conference supported by a wiki, one of our corporate clients got very excited about getting one going back at his office. They're an international company and needed to exchange information among all of the learning- and training-related people, so it was a great fit for them. They asked us to research tools, and we evaluated dozens and dozens of wikis.
We were looking for a wiki that was truly enterprise-caliber, and Confluence turned out to be the one. It has highly granular permissions control, it supports LDAP integration so security can be ensured, and it's highly extensible. We've made tremendous use of the Confluence extensions library — most of our sites use dozens of plugins.
How did the design evolve? Does designing for a wiki change the way you work?
Our clients value our creative application of technologies because we take measures to ensure that our solutions are standards-compliant, visually appealing, and user-centered. For example, we are designing a website for the Smithsonian so they can have a fairly large number of people editing the site. For wiki-based sites such as the Constitution Day site for the National Constitution Center, we determine the best approach for balancing layout and workflow. With that project, we went into a lot of detail about their expectations for the user experience and what they wanted people to do on the site. The conversations about use cases and what the user path might look like were especially important because the idea of a wiki-based website is pretty new to end users and to our clients. We then worked up several options to choose from.
What is different about working with a wiki is thinking about varying the complexity of the design in different areas of the site in order to allow users to contribute content. That changes everything. With typical web design, you don't have to think about how much user freedom is going to be allowed in different areas. That freedom is very new.
What would you say is the most beneficial aspect of using a wiki for web publishing?
Wikis allow for user-contributed content, which makes it easy for our clients to keep their websites up-to-date. So there's a timeliness factor. When anyone in the organization, whether it's a 15-person research institute or a big company, can be authorized to maintain a page or a whole site, the content can be updated and refreshed more frequently.
Another benefit is better use of resources. Because anyone can contribute content, the wiki allows our clients to aggregate information from a wide variety of people. It eliminates the webmaster bottleneck, and they really like that.
We also tell our clients, especially when we're working with smaller and mid-size groups, "With a wiki like Confluence, you're not only getting an intranet, you're really getting an extranet, too. Why not have a 'Clients-Only' area and manage your projects that way?" They love that. They don't usually have those tools in place even though they could use them.
So, initially your clients view Confluence as a web-publishing tool and then they see it's also a great collaboration tool?
Exactly. The collaboration aspect opens up new possibilities for them.
- "We have come to see Confluence as a toolkit for building a collaboration space." Juan Leon, Night Kitchen Interactive
How did you design the Constitution Day wiki for user-contributed content?
We realized early on that we needed to create a "self-healing" wiki design. We didn't know what people were going to add, so we had to design the site to accommodate just about anything without affecting the look and feel. We defined three "zones" and then created a design template for each zone.
The first zone is pretty much locked-down. Very few people have editing rights on it. Pages like the home page that are elaborately designed and don't require frequent editing are in this zone. This is where the fine-grained permission structure we get from Confluence is crucial.
The second zone includes what we call landing pages. These aren't as elaborately designed and can be edited by more people without disrupting the overall design of the site. Editors on the client side who have a little Confluence training are typically the ones making changes to pages in this zone.
The third zone has the minimum degree of design complexity, which usually means the minimum degree of wiki markup that could bewilder the general user population. People can come in and add bullets, tables and those sorts of things and their input will harmonize with the overall site. This is the self-healing part. We worked a lot with more flexible containers, like panels, that can handle any amount of content. And we created stylesheets that can anticipate things users might add and style them to match the overall design.
For example, one of the key functions of the Constitution Day site was for content providers to create descriptions of the resources they had available to the public. All of the different descriptions about all the different resources provided by many different content providers needed a consistent look and feel. So we used panels and layouts that could accommodate long or short descriptions, images, basically all variety of input.
How do you address the issue of control over content?
We don't take the traditional administrator's view — starting with everything locked down and then granting privileges little by little to the people that absolutely must have them to do their jobs. With the wiki, in terms of access and authoring, we start with the opposite approach. We leave things as open as possible and restrict access only if problems arise. It goes back to the Confluence permissions structure, which is very robust. We haven't built any public sites that allow anonymous users to add content. We use groups to grant permissions — people either self-select into a group or apply to become a member of a group. Clients determine what levels of permissions to grant to different users. They sometimes ask if they can have a review/approval process before pages are published. Once they know they can, they're satisfied.
You also created a plugin for an advanced search capability. Tell us about that.
The existing Confluence search engine is very powerful. It indexes the entire site, including attachments, and the free text search is fast and thorough. The problem is that members of the general public don't necessarily know what to search for. They need more structure. So we asked Adaptavist (an Atlassian partner) to build a plugin that worked with the descriptions provided by the content partners to create an advanced search tool. It's like a search wizard — allowing users to use checkboxes, drop-down lists, and other kinds of controls to define the searches they want.
The National Constitution Center was also able to predefine certain searches. For example, when an educator comes to the Constitution Day site, goes to the educators landing page, and clicks on search, a search will automatically run for materials that are labeled as appropriate for educators. So the first thing educators see is the results of that search, and from there they can refine their search using the checkboxes and drop-down lists.
The plugin really makes it easy for users to come in and quickly find what they need, which is what the site is all about. Both the tool and the site ended up being a big success.
How did you first learn about Adaptavist's Builder for creating new Confluence themes and why did you select it?
We found out about Builder through the Atlassian website, and the deciding factor was that it was recommended to us by an Atlassian consultant. Builder centralizes design decisions and changes and allows our graphics people to work more easily with cascading style sheets in one place. Fortunately, Builder is also quite affordable.
- "Wikis allow for user-contributed content, which makes it easy for our clients to keep their websites up-to-date... It[a wiki] eliminates the webmaster bottleneck, and they really like that." Juan Leon, Night Kitchen Interactive
Did you take advantage of Atlassian resources (forums, supports, documentation, blogs, etc.) when creating the Constitution Day wiki?
Yes, quite a lot. I was on the Atlassian website daily during the National Constitution Center project. Whenever I'm working on a Confluence project I have a browser window open to Atlassian's Extensions Library where much of the documentation for plugins is found. Free-text searches of the site also reveal a lot of guidance sitting in discussion forums or formal help documentation. Answers to development questions might come out of a forum, or a bug tracked in JIRA, or other places on the site, but I always find what I need.