Earlier this week, we spent some time catching up with Adrienne Bassett, an interaction designer on the Yahoo! Search team. Adrienne was one of five Yahoos that recently took a leave of absence to redesign the ONE.org website, the online arm of the ONE campaign, an organization founded by U2's Bono that's fighting global poverty and AIDS.

This project was the latest focus of the "Yahoo! for Good Scrum" initiative, an internal program that allows Yahoo! employees to take time off from their typical day jobs to apply their technical talents to projects with a social mission.

We asked Adrienne to share her experience working behind the scenes on this project.

Enjoy!

Adrienne, what exactly is a Scrum?

A scrum is basically a small team of people working on a project that's accomplished in short, concentrated bursts of activity with very specific goals. They can be pretty intense, although the ONE.org project was technically more like a charrette or a hack day, our team was working on a combination of design, usability and functionality problems all at once.

What was the team trying to accomplish with the redesign?

The ONE campaign is all about how people can incite change, one by one, to fight AIDS and poverty. The campaign has a huge global community of supporters, but it wasn't very visible with the previous website. Our goal was to change that, to capture and infuse community back into ONE.org. Also, to use the site for creating and growing awareness of the ONE campaign.

What were some of the ways that the team "infused community" into ONE.org?

Something we learned fairly quickly was that ONE campaign communities were already forming and thriving online, so part of our challenge was simply aggregating, organizing and supporting these communities via the ONE.org site. I'll give you a few examples:

Several ad hoc Yahoo! Groups have formed around the campaign in the last two years, with the new site, we're now showcasing these groups for supporters that might not have otherwise known about them, we're also providing easy-to-use tools and resources to encourage new group forming at a local level. ONE Groups are now surfacing in cities across the U.S. In fact we're using the Yahoo! Maps API to capture and track this growth via the "Where is One" page.

Another good example is the "Who is One" module on the front page. Often you see lists of names of people who have pledged their support for a cause, ONE.org has this too, but we wanted to take things a step further and enable people to share their faces as well. The Who is One module is a living and breathing photo mosaic of the people behind the ONE campaign. I think it adds an interesting dimension to the site. People are no longer just names on a list. You can see them. They can see you. It visually humanizes the campaign in a powerful new way.

There are several other examples I could point to, ranging from ways we've incorporated community education and learning via Yahoo! Answers, to a customized ONE toolbar, we've even created virtual ONE tees for people's Yahoo! avatars.

Tell us more about those avatar tees...

I think for the same reason people wear the white ONE wristbands in the real world as a sign of support, the avatar t-shirts are a way for people to share their support on the web. It's also simply a unique way to get people talking and connecting with each based on common interests.

Now you took three months off from your day job to work on this project. How tough was that?

At first it was difficult, leaving my team wasn't easy, but they were all very supportive which helped. As luck would have it, I was also between projects when this opportunity surfaced, so it was good timing for me. I've been with Yahoo! for a little over five years now, and it was a good chance for me to detach from my typical assignments, to wear a different hat and to work with a different purpose.

How did you get this entire project done in three months!?

We had an amazing team of people working on this project -- all day, everyday -- each of us with a unique skill set. It wasn't a big team, I was only one of five, but we shared a collective interest and passion for this project that was clear from the get-go. I also have to thank folks like Meg Garlinghouse and Geoff Ralston who were incredibly supportive and gave us very valuable feedback and guidance along the way.

Were there any significant challenges you had to overcome?

You mean other than getting this project from start to finish in three months!? Yeah, we hit a few bumps, nothing too significant, I think our biggest challenge had to do with ways we could balance user-created content, like comments, photos, etc., with some reasonable backend controls for moderation. There's a degree of risk the ONE.org website had to accept by enabling communities to connect and express their opinions and feelings freely via the site, our team tried to mitigate this risk by building and baking in some simple controls.

What would consider your big personal takeaway, now that it's complete?

I certainly feel invested (emotionally) in the ONE campaign, I feel pride with what we've accomplished, I'll continue to do as much as I can to support it. I also walk away with gratitude toward Yahoo! and my team for giving me the freedom and flexibility to work on such a cool assignment, I'm looking forward to returning and digging back into things.

I don't think anyone on our team will forget this experience. It was good for the mind and soul.