Portfolio Case Study: http://www.sjmprofessional.com. Sharepoint 2007 (MOSS 2007) public facing website.
Overview
The St. Jude Medical Professionals website project was one of the most successful of my career at Brilliant Blue. Strategy, User Experience, Design, Creativity, Functionality, Technology, Information Architecture - they all came together to create something I am very proud to have been a part of.
Problem-Directive
Create a first-class online brand extension for St. Jude's Medical Professional website. Three target audiences: Physicians/Fellows, Medical Administrators and the public (potential consumers).
Additional Considerations
Requirements included the use of Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server 2007 as the technology platform. A week-long conference with Microsoft at their Technology Center in Austin Texas was intended to mitigate any limitations of working with MOSS 2007 as well as to jump-start the development process and shorten the learning curve with this new and unproven platform.
Process
When we set about designing this website we followed the following process and timeline:
Planning
Meetings, meetings and more meetings were held to discover business, brand and technical requirements. Project plans were created and modified. Content was gathered. User Profiles and Use Case diagrams were developed. Eventually a Sitemap was approved.
Concepting
Initial Creative Conceptuals and Wireframes were developed based on the content, user profiles, use cases and sitemap.
information Architecture
Content Maps, Security Maps and Functional Specifications for the website were started.
Prototype Development
A prototype version of the website was developed which allowed for basic browsing, searching and form entry for the key pages within the site. We used ModX CMS for this task as it is very quick to deploy and as easy for experienced developers as a static html prototype would have been.
Analysis
Internal reviews were held between our agency departments and the clients key decision makers. We coordinated with Human Factors on Usability testing with a selected focus group of users which covered the user profiles as well as a typical cross-section of general users. User testing was done based on our Use Cases as well as a variety of typical tasks on any website (Browsing, Searching, Logging In,
Data / Feedback driven Revisions
Revisions to the Concepts, Wireframes and also the Use Cases and Sitemap were made based on the Feedback we received from the focus group testing sessions. The timeline and estimates of work were adjusted as needed and priorities determined based on allocated budgets.
User Testing Round 2
An additional round of user testing was performed to prove out the revisions we had made. 90% of our revisions achieved improvements on a variety of tasks.
Development started
Having completed a full suite of planning tasks, review tasks and received approval on all of the above from the client with feedback from focus groups, we began developing the backend of the site.
Technology Review with Microsoft
One of the technical requirements of this project was to utilize many of the capabilities provided by the new MOSS 2007 platform. To this end the client engaged us with the Microsoft Tech Center in Austin Texas for a week of discussion and guided development. Our early planning and testing paid off tremendously here as we were able to bring all of our results with us and could focus on the development aspect of the site with confidence in our prior decisions.
Major Development Completed
Content Integration, SEO and Standards Compliance Testing
W3C and WAI Level 2 Compliance was achieved.
User Testing Round 3
A final round of User Testing was completed to confirm the final implementation of the website still maintained the expected user success rate as seen during the prototype phase.
Final Revisions
There are always a last minute set of changes to be made ;-p
Launch and Deployment
MOSS 2007 was not the easiest platform to migrate to a live production server. This took a while to do correctly.
Post Launch Review
This project was quite long and so definitely required a post launch review to assess whether we met all of the business requirements and achieved the goals set out by the client. Everyone agreed that it was an incredible success both as a final deliverable and as a project.