Every week hundreds of young men, young women, and seniors around the world gather with their families to read a letter calling them to serve as full-time missionaries. The letter includes an assignment to labor in one of 348 missions around the world.

This sacred piece of correspondence is customized to each missionary candidate with specific information and instructions for the assignment. The Missionary Call Letter System was developed in 2008, and it is currently used to generate hundreds of missionary letters every week. Some may think that creating a one-page letter programmatically would be a matter of adding a few merge fields to a document, but the system does a lot more than that.

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It’s Tuesday night and you are the ward finance clerk. The bishop has asked you to provide him with some information pertaining to the most recent tithes and offerings batch that was just deposited last Sunday. You log in to MLS and try to get the information, but you get a system error that will not let you complete your assigned task. You’ve never seen this error before, and it will not let you proceed until you resolve the problem.

The second counselor who is there doesn’t know what to do, and you’re unable to reach the stake clerk or stake technology specialist for help with your problem. Does this sound familiar? Anyone who has served in the bishopric, stake presidency, or mission office has at one time or another felt frustrated by a membership, finance, or computer system malfunction. 

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To scriptorians, PGP means “Pearl of Great Price” but to cryptographers, it means “Pretty Good Privacy” and refers to the safe-keeping of personal information. PGP is a type of encryption the Church uses to communicate securely with other organizations, such as banks and businesses. Each day we depend on encryption to act as a computerized safe-and-key system for managing access to our data.

Phil Zimmermann, the creator of PGP, developed and released the first PGP software in 1991. He published his source code and freely gave it away for anyone to use. The software is simple to use and is designed to encrypt files and e-mail transferred over the Internet. PGP is now the most popular e-mail encryption software in the world.

How does PGP work?

PGP requires entities or individuals to create their own individual pair of encryption keys. The key pair contains a private key that is never shared with anyone and a public key that is shared with everyone. Anyone can use a public key and encrypt a file or message with it. However, only the entity or person with the corresponding private key will be able to decrypt it. This is known as a one-way function. The technical implementation of a one-way function is brilliant but simple.

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Here at the Church, we develop projects of various sizes that require designing and building prototypes of varying complexity. Much of my experience has been with large prototypes, and I wish to offer three suggestions for handling 20+ XHTML pages and numerous other assets.

#1: File Organization

A good Web application will have a domain structure that mirrors the content structure. This allows users to see where they are both on the Web page and the address bar of their Web browser.

For example:

“domain.org/temples”

is much cleaner and clearer than:
“www4.domain.org/webservices/construct/pagecontent/pageGenerator?id=temples&mode=981ASDFKH171ASDKFJ19”

In my projects, I like to separate page structure from assets like this:

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Usually an interaction designer works to understand and implement project requirements in a way that allows users to most effectively accomplish their tasks. In this model, team members review designs and offer feedback, which leads to valuable improvements in the product design. Various iterations with the team happen before the design is even presented to the client.

When you present the design to the client, the client usually requests additional changes, which in turn leads to further iterations of design. The whole process to complete a design varies in the number of iterations—it can be excessive or light, depending on the team and client.

However, I’ve recently discovered several advantages to collaborative interaction design—that is, working alongside another designer on the same project. Collaborative design can reduce the number of iterations it takes to reach a high quality of design.

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Question

What do you do at the Church?

Answer

Question

What role do you think the Mobile Device Team plays in the Church organization?

Answer

We try to make the employees’ mobile device experience as smooth and trouble-free as possible. For example, a lost, damaged, or stolen cell phone can represent a minor tragedy in the life of a citizen of the 21st century! We resolve problems as painlessly as possible by having a small stock of lightly-used surplus devices available for immediate replacement. This minimizes “phoneless” down-time. Without this service, hundreds of dollars would be spent on each replacement phone, so we feel we save the Church significant dollars as we help maximize employee productivity.

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