A CMS front-end and back-end
Project Duration
2009-2010 and 2014-2015
Objective:
Design, testing and implementation of an interactive, multilingual online platform for the transfer of knowledge
Responsibilities
- I led a team of professionals from the areas of design, user interface development, system administration engineering, content writing, translation and scientific research through the design, testing and implementation phases of this project. Through the 6 year period (2009-2010 design and testing+2014-2015 design and testing + 2016-2021 design, testing and implementation) in which this product was produced, tested and implemented under my supervision, I:
- Led the team through a participative procedure for identifying, defining and prioritizing the users’ needs which align with key business strategies and goals;
- Motivated my team to proactively and directly integrate within the delivery schedule in order to maximize value within the budget;
- Mentored team members, individually and as a team, into improving their ability to empathize with the user experiences and produce better user experiences for the product.
- I selected adequate team members for the technical positions (user interface development and translation), all other positions, being in-house. I was also responsible for making employee discharge reports to the director and for offering advice to the director regarding contracted employees’ salaries.
- Mediated the relationship between software development team and stakeholders, coaching them through the tradeoffs between resources, goals, technology, design methodology in order to maximize impact on the user experience for the product.
- Supported the decision-making process for prioritization of the platforms’ features by identifying user needs and development constraints and mapping these into a roadmap to deliver expected value to users and business owners within the timeframe and the budget.
- Practiced as usability researcher, designer and strategist and focused on submitting critical deliverables, by using user-centered research and evaluation methods.
- Wrote contracts together with the legal department and task books for each position, and estimated time and financial project budget.
The final product
The online platform is a bilingual interface which transfers scientific knowledge from scholars to potential users. In the back-end there were professionals specialized in editorial work, content writing, translation, quality review and UI maintenance and development. The platform was designed to include back-end work flow and front-end user engagement channels, as well as multiple levels of security checks throughout back- and front-end. The product’s goals were to increase consumption of knowledge, increase demand for knowledge in local markets, build a database, get ranked in a variety of search engines, be easy to manage and maintain, create a competitive advantage for scoring higher into industry rankings of similar platforms and ultimately build a brand.
Challenges and achievements
I was part of the first, second and third re-design stages of this product. In the first design stage there was high expected demand, but no standards for developing such products. We chose a team which was very creative in designing and developing the platform. However, this backfired in the maintenance stage when the same team contracted for maintenance services disappeared and none of the other developers were able to successfully maintain the product. This led to a re-design decision. I was again charged with developing the re-design of the product, but a lot of the design decisions were made politically and not user-centered. This time I insisted we use industry standards. It was a successful development, despite some drawbacks. However, the product soon lost the political support it had before and was left without a budget, due to issues unrelated to its performance. After some time, when the conflict at the basis of the loss of support lost momentum, I was asked to re-design the product and launch it again. This time, I had full decision power on its design and methods, but no real budget. Despite the challenges, the last product was able to reach over 100.000 unique knowledge consumers, which is approx. 100 times more than the 3 top platforms on the local market.
