I went down to Miami, to meet with a Time Share Company who desperately needed to redesign their intranet. The challenge was to incorporate each of the subsidiaries brandings while letting their employees know they are part of a larger corporate company. The parent company had their own brand and message that would need to be seen by every employee under its corporate umbrella.
Before I had any meetings with the client, I had to ramp up on SharePoint capabilities and functionality. If you ever used SP before you know it's a robust tool with many features, but it's not the best platform to create designs.
The planning phase began with meeting all the companies employees and various departments. My goal was to figure out what gave them the most value when the logged in to the intranet. So each department had different needs, some units preferred to host commonly shared documents while others preferred to access third-party applications from the departmental homepage. This has to be taken into account when conceptualizing designs.
Now that user personas were created, I moved on to creating wireframes. Personas help me put myself in the shoes of the user. It allows you to build empathy with the user when developing and designing the workflow. One thought kept crossing my mind; is this beneficial to the user?
After several iterations of meetings and presenting my design to the client. I moved to visual designs. Transparency is essential when working with clients. You want to keep them informed of every step in the process. Visual Designs allows them to see a pixel-perfect representation of the site before any coding.
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