For Avaya I worked on an in-house file system portal where marketing teams across the world could find final files belonging to their own marketing campaigns as well as from other teams. Due to the sensitive nature of the contents, third party applications like box.com or dropbox were not a choice, a custom-made service was necessary.
Our designs file were stored in a third party cloud storage system that eventually became not-compliant with the company's security and data privacy policies. We had to switch to a different service that was compliant, but this new service lacked some features that we learned later were fundamental for a successful asynchronous collaboration between teams in different parts of the world.
Despite us having a former storage system, we set out to find ways to introduce improvements in the new version. We had several rounds of conversations with marketing managers and some of their team members to hear them out and understand their needs. In the process we also learned that we also needed something from this library – we are another set of users after all.
Our library was simply a façade replacing the interface of the actual storage service, with search and categorization features better suited for our needs. The simple folder-within-folder storage system wasn't enough. We needed to be able to tag campaigns and make them available based on different categories or search terms from our internal corporate lingo.
The sitemap represents in a very simple way all the access points for individual campaigns as well as the upload area, available only to designers and project managers.
Agreeing on the needs of the different user-groups was the easiest part. Our goals overlapped quite well, so when it was time to do wireframes we had a very strong sense of what the tool should offer.
We had few rounds dedicated to discuss and draft wireframes with stakeholders. Enough to define a layout and have a developer quickly create a click-dummy in html – this was before Figma or Adobe XD.
The main challenge was making campaigns available on the library. We would upload the files to the storage system and place the links for each file in an excel file. We would upload the excel files to our library and the system would read the excel files to generate a visualization of the campaign in the front-end. The excel files were also our backup – in case the library should ever be offline or decommissioned.
Wireframes in order of appearance:
home page, business line page, campaign page
For two weeks I was forced to step away from work and focus on my personal life. Fortunately, all the ground work had been done and the library was ready for visual design. Upon my return ~90% of the visual design was done. We did some final adjustments and while uploading the necessary campaigns for a successful launch.
Stakeholders requested some campaigns to be added for the launch, and we selected a few others that were highly demanded to be added as well.We finished it all and sent out an email blast: The library is online!
Campaigns were now delivered in a secure way to the requestors, and observers could access the files without needing a separate additional request.
Each team was able to attack their own markets while maintaining a coherent brand narrative for the company. Especially important for global events and campaigns.
Marketing teams across the globe had access to files from other regions, facilitating tasks like localization.
No more back and forth regarding files and expiring dropbox links. With a login users had access to the files they needed.
We made a bunch of very important people very happy. And as a personal note, I hold this project very close to my heart because it was my very first UCD and UX design project.