CASE STUDY
|
|
BackgroundEarly 2018, I met the Director of Architecture and Information Systems of a large government-organization at a technology meetup in Toronto. The organization was currently trying to consolidate all the internal legacy systems into a brand new webapp. I pitched a design concept and was invited to present the proposal at their head office.
A week later I presented my project proposal to the VP and CTO of IT and the technology leadership team. They extended an offer for me to lead a 24-week exploratory design project on the spot. |
|
About the client
The client organization is funded by the Government of Ontario and currently employs ~1700 people. Their mission is to "serve Ontario property taxpayers together with provincial and municipal stakeholders through accurate and timely property assessments and a commitment to service excellence and efficiency".
Their business model employs large teams of travelling assessment specialists that use their software in the field to calculate the property values of everything from small residential apartment units to complex multi-faceted public facilities like airports and shopping complexes. Currently, an assessment specialist needs to use 5+ applications to record different details, and because inefficient legacy UIs, most use an excel document to take notes and then transfer them to the system when they return from a trip.
Looking at a sample screenshot, it is clear there is plenty of redundancy in the system, as current users need to manually copy and paste fields into multiple apps, and the interface for location-based searching is extremely outdated and unusable.
Project GoalsAfter our initial round of discussions, I came up with a series of goals and an example for how to measure success for the project which were subsequently approved by the CTO and IT Directors.
The underlying objective for these project goals are based off of research that the client has already completed. |
|
Methodology Sample
I sat down with the technology leadership and some leads of different development teams to discuss the current products and how they envision the new app would work. We created a simplified map of the most critical processes for this proposal and scoped the work to five general steps. Please see my other projects for pre-requirements UX research.
|
Brainstorming
The first portion of the engagement was spent familiarizing myself with the project. I was given access to the systems and could request JSON dumps on the most important components. I met with the business and IT stakeholders to narrow down the specifics of what we wanted this "vision" workflow to cover, as it was unrealistic to deliver a complete workflow in the span of a 370 hour contract. We worked out an end-to-end journey and distilled it to a simplified product workflow that satisfied around 80% of common use cases. |
|
Flow Planning
Now with the scope in place I talked to some assessment specialists as well as their managers to get additional insight into how the current product is being used. In observing the usage of the product, it was easy to see there are some clear tasks that users were trying to accomplish with different components of the different apps. These components were tallied and broken down into different use cases and associated with a list of features. The features are then categorized to pages and plotted out to establish a flow. |
|
A spreadsheet I created to inventory form fields, what app they are from and some sample inputs
|
|
Information Architecture
One of the critical components of all existing apps and the newly planned flow was the property listings page. I worked with various stakeholders to comb through the fields in all the legacy apps to create a list for what the average residential listing can contain as well as information on what type of field it is and how long the average entry is. I ran through some exercises to come up with an alternate grouping structure for these fields based on importance and different workflows. The goal is to still provide access to all the information, but in a contextual and as-needed basis. |
|
Wireframing
Next I started on looking into how we will visually place the information for the property listing page. Here we try to present the groups of data from earlier exercises on a single long page. In this example, we utilize a sticky vertical navigation bar so users can quickly jump to the section they need without too much scrolling. These were repeatedly tested with internal users and refined before moving on to the higher fidelity work. |
|
|
Completed Designs
For the Hi-Fi mockups, we decided to start with a tablet view with the idea that is easier to modify a design from a slightly smaller screen to a larger screen. Many concepts such as a locking listing-specific navigation, always available editing, and modular fields were all considered in this design. |
|
|
During the span of this project of this project, similar methodology and work were completed for other components of the project as well, resulting in a series of screens which were hooked together into a prototype. Screen recordings of the prototype through simple flows were used by the department to present this project to key business stakeholders, resulting in additional funding and support for the project.
Here is a subset of the final screenshots that were used to create an interactive prototype. |
Impact
The stakeholders for this design project were all very pleased with the deliverables (both for web and mobile) which were completed in line with the schedule and goals I outlined in my project proposal. Feel free to ask me about why certain design decisions were made and I can dive deep into the details and our rationale and research behind the decision.
At the end of my time with the client, they expressed they would be interesting in converting my contract into a full-time position so I can stay on for the implementation phase of this project. Unfortunately I did not have the capacity to produce work on a full-time basis on-location as I was already working full-time. We agreed that for the implementation piece, they needed someone in-house to take responsibility of the project.
At the end of my time with the client, they expressed they would be interesting in converting my contract into a full-time position so I can stay on for the implementation phase of this project. Unfortunately I did not have the capacity to produce work on a full-time basis on-location as I was already working full-time. We agreed that for the implementation piece, they needed someone in-house to take responsibility of the project.
More Projects:
