Global Permissions System (GPS)
A McGraw Hill Education Global Enterprise Web Application
Overview
The company required a custom solution for managing and monitoring contract agreement rights for all intellectual property assets (i.e. photos, art, video, audio, font, and text assets) used in McGraw Hill products globally and for aligning divergent business processes among various divisions of the organization. I was brought on in the early stages of development to plan user flows, provide visual design direction and guide the overall user experience.
Steps to Success
The process began with gaining an understanding of the tasks and processes entailed in current practices used by different groups and their varying workflows within the organization. Interviews with business leads and stakeholders helped in assessing pain points in systems employed, identifying needs for process alignment, and opportunities for potential efficiencies.
Much pre-planning had been done by stakeholders and project managers when I joined the team, so there was a rough outline of sprints established with high-level requirements identified and organized into sprint plans for the first two releases. Now it was a matter of reviewing those requirements and breaking them down into user stories for grooming discussions and establishing user flows through the various tasks involved.
With epic-level requirments broken into smaller user stories, detailed discussions ensued with Business Analysts, Business Leads and UX Design to identify individul use cases and more granular requirements for each. During these sessions, I began sketching story-level UI designs and generating low-fidelity wireframess to give visual context and begin shaping the user experience.
Notes, Sketches, and Lo-Fi Wireframes for "Content Plan" UI
When initial grooming sessions ended for a given story, I would take the story, sketches, and simple wireframes and begin constructing more hi-fidelity wireframes and prototypes with interactions specified for use cases within the story. These prototypes were then reviewed with the assigned Business Analyst and Business Lead to refine the story and wireframes until all three team members were satisfied that the story was ready for approval discussion with the full team. Often review with the larger business team would require further refinement of both story and prototype and follow-up meetings were scheduled, until all stakeholders agreed that development could proceed.
Hi-Fidelity Wireframes and
Final UI for "Content Plan" UI
Between grooming sessions and UX wireframe development, I also was responsible for generating UI deliverables to serve as guidelines for development. I establised and gained approval from stakeholders for:
- the overall UI visual design with color palette based on corporate branding guidelines
- UI style guidelines for tables, forms, modals, various icons and symbols to be used throughout
- UI interactions guidelines to detail expected behavior for the various modes of content display and data entry
Stories and wireframes were submitted for review by the off-shore development team and a planning meeting held to discuss questions, concerns, and suggestions they had in preparing for the next sprint. These discussions would result in the development team either accepting the story into the sprint or rejecting the story based on concerns for complexity and band-width. Issues and concerns would be taken back to UX, Business stakeholders and Project Managers for analysis and resolution.
Development sprints culminated in a walk-through review of implementation for stories developed, attended by Project Management, Business stakeholders, and UX Design. Assessments were made at this time of whether development was completed according to given requirements, or if further refinement was required.
Toward the end of development cycles, as UX responsibilities would decrease with a backlog ready for the upcoming sprints, I took an active role in daily QC meetings. As I was testing for quality control, logging bugs in the QC bug tracking system, and fixing front-end bugs that were assigned to me, I also made various improvements in the UI for consistency and better usability.
Always reviewing and testing with an eye toward good usability and consistency, I kept an active list of potential usability improvements based on feedback from stakeholders and users as well as my own experiences from testing and front-end development work I was performing.
