Admin Kit — Mathieu Moussa

PREVIOUS SOLUTION

Three disjoint excel sheets were used by Document Controllers & Automation Engineers from over 30 CCC International mega construction projects to administrate VBC, an Electronic Document Management System.

GOAL

Understand how these excel sheets were negatively affecting users, and why support got too many complaints. Use the results of the findings to design and release the 1st iteration of a superior replacement for Admin Kit within 6 months.

PROCESS

User Research, UI Design, Kanban

I lead the user research and design efforts as well as managed the client-side development process.

For user research, i ran contextual inquiries with 5 lead support and automation engineers over a period of 2 weeks to understand their pain points.

Using thematic analysis, I identified the top recurring topics and the impact they had on the users’ daily routines. First, performance was compromised by the fact that excel sheets were overloaded with macros. These macros were error prone and turned out to be the lead cause for support requests. Second, users suffered while learning and navigating the complicated interface, and Excel had very limited API to remedy that. Finally, users complained about having to switch between three excel sheets and VBC Dashboard to perform their tasks and this slowed their workflows significantly.

To solve the latter problem, we decided to make Admin Kit part of VBC Dashboard, the online portal web-app, that way users wouldn’t have to switch between different apps to perform related work. I used the other analyzed findings, to start producing low fidelity wireframes that in turn were presented to the team and shareholders to refine the requirements for the system and set the initial information architecture.

Wireframe of the new Admin Kit’s home screen. Used in meetings with stakeholders to refine vision and agree on features and their layouts

Final implementation of Admin Kit’s home screen after designing and reviewing several low and high-fidelity mock-ups

The wireframes were than converted into interactive prototypes and were the bases of usability study that now encompassed more extensive set of engineers and two stakeholders. This phase helped solidify the direction of design decisions and validate if these decisions were serving the issues uncovered in the initial contextual inquiries. The studies helped me discover a handful of refinements that were added in the iterative process of design and development.

My research and usability studies showed that users would benefit from previously unseen features. For example, automation engineers and support found themselves having to navigate between various VBC objects to painstakingly gather information for one user when they needed to verify security rights, report them, or clone them to another member. This led me to conceive and design a new feature, the User Security Profile, which allowed to consolidate all system and security info for one user and present them on one comprehensive eye-catching page.

Rough initial sketch shows the division of the main 3 panels on the newly introduced feature: User Security Profile

Final implementation of the User Security Profile

We used a Kanban approach during development and the developer received a recurring set of high-fidelity mock-ups and assets to produce the new Admin Kit as part of the VBC Dashboard.

RESULTS

The result is a refined solution that solved the majority of the problems faced by the users, reduced the number of concurrently open applications from 4 to 1, and introduced a set of new features that were impossible to replicate in excel. After the first release user satisfaction blew the roof off as we started receiving random positive feedback emails. The support department now jokes that no one ever calls to complain about the new Admin Kit.

TOOLS UTILIZED

Markers and paper, Axure RP, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Flex