The Projectplace June Release 2008

From a User Experience point of view

In every Projectplace release, the User Experience Design Team (UxD)plays a big role. We are the ones whose job it is to design the product so that you, our users, can use it and enjoy the experience of using it.

This release, we focused entirely on the part of the product which is called “The Project Office”. This is a very important part of project collaboration, since it is the tool for the organisation to keep track of all running as well as archived project and all project members.

What we did first, as always, was to delve into the needs and dreams of Account Administrators, the ones who would use the Project Office the most.  During the analysis, we tried to get as much input as possible from users, sales representatives and customer support. They are the ones with the most knowledge and without them, designing would be impossible.

The analysis we did ended up in a so called Persona, which is kind of a user artefact that embodies the  Account Administrators. The Persona, a widely used design method, helps us to really get to know the users and to keep focused on what’s important for them.

With our great Persona at hand, we started designing the new Project Office. Our main target was to:

- make it faster (since many users deal with large amounts of data)
- introduce a logical structure
- make it easy to use
- present a visual design worth its name

Not a lot of new functionality as you see, the most important goal was to dramatically enhance the quality of the existing functionality.

When the first rought sketches were done, we sat down and talked the design through with the developers who always have great insights and comments. After that, we did some more sketching before starting  to produce prototypes, which are used for estimating how much work it will take to implement the design.  A sketch can go from this:

To  something like this:

The final design, which is released the 14th of June, was also tested by usability experts from InUse. The test results was really good and we got some great feedback on how to make the design even better.

We at UxD really hope that you will enjoy the new Project Office. We have already started working on the next release, and will most definitely speak to some of you to get good ideas and inspiration!

Sincerely,