Connect 2 Cleanrooms

Building a UCD ground

The first thing to do was to understand the business and the users’ needs.

I gathered those by leading workshops with the client together with my team, as well as by running one-to-one interviews with typical personas.

The outcomes were collated into design principles, personas, KPIs, goals and user stories.

Organising the content

One of the main challenges was the content. The old website had a lot of wordy and outdated content.

I created a content audit template. Being such a technical topic, I tasked the experts (aka the client) with going through each page and auditing it. The audit included Google Analytics data, as well as more qualitative estimations such as which persona the content was for or whether it was outdated or not.

Based on this content audit and on the user stories from personas research I was able to create a content strategy and a new information architecture.

Prototyping with devs in mind

Next, there was the prototype to build.

On the client’s request, the website was going to be developed in Magento and this represented another challenge, as it required an ad-hoc use of Magento.

During the prototype phase, I worked closely with front end and back end developers, to validate what I was designing.

While building the prototypes in Axure I was also annotating the expected behaviour of the various widgets.

The result

Clean and fresh visual style

Future friendly and intuitive CMS

A UCD solution for different users

An example of how I addressed user needs in the prototypes comes from the knowledge centre. This was an important section of the website.

From research, it became clear that we were dealing with both experts in cleanrooms and people who were new to the topic.

In order to create an ideal user journey for both audiences, I designed the knowledge centre page as follows:

• at the top there was a search bar that allowed experts to jump straight into what they were specifically looking for
• below the search bar, a link was saying “I am new to cleanrooms, give me an overview”. This linked through to a page that gave inexperienced users an overview of what a cleanroom is in a jargon-free tone of voice. Further links were provided here too, in case users want to delve deeper.

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