Portals as a basis for collaboration
Challenge
The challenge set by CRH was to create a set of portals that would be adopted and used by CRH employees to increase collaboration between teams and operating companies.
Collaborationwith Office 365
The CRH Collaboration Platform is build on the Microsoft Office 365, allowing for powerful collaboration features like document editing, document collaboration or sharing of documents and information with ease.
User testing & UX process
The starting point of this project was to involve a user board from all the operating companies. By either meeting at their office or by a Skype call, I gathered insights about their needs, wishes and behaviour. During multiple meetings with the user board, the clickable wireframe was slowly tuned and improved.
Step by stepMy design process
During the CRH project I worked closely with the user board, product owner and our creative director. The following steps were taken to make this a successful project.
- Concept and exploration
- To inspire the product owner and key users, the first step was to explore concepts for the collaboration portals for CRH.
- Paper prototyping
- During a workshop, a select group of key users from different operating companies were invited to join a paper prototyping session. This gave insight in the different wishes and even demonstrating different wishes and insight per operating company.
- Testing clickable wireframes
- After the paper prototyping, the results of the workshop were transformed into a clickable prototype. This was shared with the key users during meetings and Skype calls.
- Define user stories
- The finalised wireframe gave information for the creation of user stories, features and epics for the backlog.
- Visual design
- With the UX in place, the visual design started. Giving a first impression by creating design based on the clickable wireframes. The visual design gave the opportunity to solve some UX issues that couldn’t be solved in the wireframe (e.g. status messages)
- Visual design for development
- The wireframe and visual design were input for the front-end developers, together with a style guide and reusable components the portals were quickly developed.