Functional Spec (Website Version 3)

Yes it's dull, yes it's boring, but here's the functional specification for V3 of the WSC website. Enjoy!

What's this Document For?

This specification considers what the user expects when the go to the finished website - what they want the website to do, and what information the website will provide. Once this specification is complete, we'll move onto the technical specification.

One thing to stress is that this specification is only a starting point. As we build the thing, we'll discover stuff that sounded good in theory but actually sucks in practice and vice versa. The important thing is that this spec, and the technical spec, are kept up-to-date as the project progresses (that's why they're on here, rather than locked up as a beautiful LaTeXy PDF in my home directory).

I would suggest that you all watch this page - get Wikithingy to send you emails or whatever it does - so that you stay up-to-date.

Overview

Promote, Discover, Recruit.

(Notice I've left management out of that - we'll come back to back-office functions later).

For the purposes of this document, we'll refer to regular cinema-goers as wales (because they bask in the sea of the interwebs catching crill - information - being emitted from the WSC website) and the people involved as activists (because they feed the wales and take an interest in their survival).

Notice the big grey box? The methodology for that is:

1. Promotion: obviously we want to let people know that WSC is here (preferably by being first in a Google search when wales type "Warwick film soc"). To do this we announce ourselves, talk technical (in a cinema sense - come back to that later), and display an awesome collection of films - which brings us nicely to...
2. Discovery: the second pivotal goal of this thing is to make sure that all the wales out there close their browser window having resolved to see films that they previously wouldn't have seen. This is nicely profitable and keeps the wales basking.
3. Recruitment: in general, the first thing people do when they think about joining a society is tap it into Google and look at the website. This is, again quite closely typed to promotion.

So, with that in mind:

Major Features

1. Awesomely simple to use.
   1. Critical that you don't need to install anything (e.g. "update your Flash player).
   2. Works in all browsers (even IE 6) - no bugging the user to upgrade their browser.
   3. "Schedule" takes you to schedule, "Films" takes you to films and so-on. No terse icons if possible.
2. Awesomely convenient.
   1. Offer news etc as RSS feeds.
   2. Offer schedules as calendar feeds that people can subscribe to in Google and offer to send emails to peoples Live@Edu accounts so they can get stuff on the calendar there.
   3. Prominently give people to option to follow on Facebook and Twitter (henceforth known as TwitFace)
   4. Do automated emails that let people know what's on that week.
   5. Make sure that people don't need to visit the website, just to know what films are on (it doesn't sound like it would be a lot of effort to just visit, but a surprising number don't.)
   6. Don't require registration to get access to these features.
      1. Let people to sign in with services they already use, e.g. FaceTwit or Google OAuth.
3. Smooth, sophisticated, refined, polished, easy etc.
4. Lots of awesome stuff to look through
   1. Avoid, if possible, allowing wales to go on a two-hour link-suck through Wikipedia while looking up all the films starring Christian Bale, cultural context, production etc.

Think that just about does it.

Design Goals...

...and general things to keep in mind.

1. Simple is better than complicated.
2. Eliminate choices the user needs to make.
3. No jargon or techy web stuff e.g. ("This page validates as XHTML 1.1, and has a valid CSS 2.1 Stylesheet") - they're expecting cinema nerdiness, not standards-compliant nerdiness.

Major Components

1. A large collection of publicity material - posters, screenshots, trailers, the lot (hopefully that won't be too hard - could also link to other internet resources).
2. A collection of static pages - again, pretty much sorted (although some will need to be reformatted, yay).
3. A database to organize, index and categorize this stuff. And finally:
4. A website, which sucks the stuff out of the database and serves it up.
   1. Also: a sub-website (possibly integrated) which makes updating the database possible OR some kind of desktop app.

Licenses and Legal Stuff

Migration of users and things shouldn't require any changes to privacy policy, any modified GPL code (any version) may need to be released somewhere.

Think that's it, onto the...

User Experience

If the user gets to the website, it's safe to assume that they already know of WSC's existence. For the sake of argument, we're going to think about three different scenarios of user (sorry - wale):

1. The casual ones who want to see what's on this week.
2. The anticipatory ones who can't wait to see Casablanca.
3. The distracted ones who're supposed to be working on an essay due tomorrow but somehow manage to find the time to go on a link-suck regarding Christian Bale.

With that in mind, there are a few core things that the website needs to get right:

1. Front page (made a good start on this). Basically, it should optimized so users can have a look at the pretty slideshow and see what's on next week, maybe look at the review and then leave.
2. Film pages containing reviews, list of cast and crew, trailers posters and screenshots, when (if ever) it was on in the past and all the technical info like length, aspect ratio, sound compression ratio etc and also some meta-information (e.g. "If you like this film...")
3. People pages - e.g. Christian Bale, give a list of films he's been in, say when he's next on, the director's he's worked with, the other actors he's worked with. Basically, everything WSC has on him (and also offer links to other sites for those who really want to go on a link-suck.)

The society retains ticketing information for all its members - so it might be cool for a logged in user to get additional stuff, such as "films I've seen" and "films I might want to see", offers to buy merchandise and, obviously, all the other perks (such as forum membership).