Thomson ReutersAgile development

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CASE STUDY

LAUNCH PORTAL

Overview

Introduction

Discovery

Planning

User Experience (UX)

User Interface (UI) Design

Agile Development

CMS Training & Content Entry

The completed MVP portal

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00.Introduction

Thomson Reuters’ customer portal was an opportunity to redefine the user experience and centralise the digital journey.

Digital Garden designed and developed the new customer portal website for Thomson Reuters (Legal) Australia to better support their customers.

Built on Drupal 8, the portal serves as a hub of information for Thomson Reuters’ suite of legal digital products and platforms.

The main aim of the project was to condense four separately managed websites across Australia and New Zealand into the one website, with regional views. The organisation was embarking on a project to unify their tone of voice, create a great user experience, and to centralise communication channels with their customer base.

The content on the portal includes training guides and materials, videos, webinars, events, company news, technical alerts and product updates catering to their Australian and New Zealand markets.

We developed this project leveraging a sprint agile-based development methodology. With the client, we priortised features to be developed within Thomon Reuters’ fixed budget yet flexible scope to help achieve a minimum viable product (MVP) that met fundamental needs.

This approach meant the Thomson Reuters were afforded complete transparency of the project’s planning and progress from its commencement, ensuring early buy-in from the key stakeholder groups.

User acceptance testing (UAT) and feedback from our client throughout development made for a final delivered product that was refined and thoroughly tested.

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01.Discovery

The discovery phase helped determine the objectives and goals of the various business units and laid the foundations for the new customer portal.

The project commenced in Q1 2017, with an initial stakeholder workshop run by Digital Garden’s project team - our technical lead, user experience & user interface (UX/UI) designer and digital producer - to help determine the key features and functionality of the customer portal.

Representatives of business units at Thomson Reuters included stakeholders from marketing & communications, customer experience (CX), training & education and information technology & integrations.

The aim of the first workshop was to include or exclude features - which we had been outlined in the pre-project scoping - into the feature requirements and prototyping stages ahead.

A follow-up technical workshop, once we had prototyped the proposed solution, was held between the technical lead and digital producer from Digital Garden and the information technology & integrations experts from Thomson Reuters.

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02.Planning

Determining the portal’s feature requirements was the cornerstone of this project.

With a fixed budget and flexible scope, Thomson Reuters engaged Digital Garden to design and develop a customer portal MVP that fulfilled key objectives from the outset.

To fit within the fixed budget, determining the functional and feature requirements within project collaboration tool Confluence - and then prioritising the importance of these - was central to ensuring the must-haves were achieved in the right timeframe at the right price.

The discussion and discovery of the initial stakeholder workshop served as a foundation for the requirements that were outlined in meticulous detail by our digital producer within Confluence.

From there, our producer and technical lead collaborated with the project lead at Thomson Reuters - on behalf of stakeholders - to define, refine, validate or de-scope requirements and the specific functional details.

We now had our blueprint for how the site would function and an approach for the interactive prototyping, user interface (UI) design and development phases to come.

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02.Planning

Planning and deliverable dates kept many business units and content contributors on-task and on-track.

Digital Garden’s most successful projects are borne out of truly collaborative partnerships with our clients.

Thomson Reuters’ project team was incredibly organised and invested in the success of the project.

The project plans we create detail in granular steps each and every planned delivery within each phase, when feedback is due and when we need approval.

As an agile-principled project, there were the simultaneously moving parts at play, with UI design sprints needing to complete their feedback loop and approval before being developed in the next development sprint. The staggered design and development sprints - and the releases to the client throughout - required our client’s team to be as organised and onboard with due dates as Digital Garden was.

The project plans we create help our clients understand what will be required of them when and what stakeholders will need to be involved in the feedback or content creation/population processes.

03.UserExperience (UX)

We create high-fidelity interactive prototypes that demonstrate how the final product will function and flow.

Digital Garden strongly advocates an approach that sees us create a high-fidelity interactive prototype of the digital solutions we will then design and develop.

Utilising shareable, cloud-based prototyping tools (our platform of choice is Axure) helps us to share our vision for the function and flow of end product in a mobile-first, responsive wireframe that is fully interactive, behaviour-rich and totally tap & clickable.

Following approval of the to-be-developed requirements, as collaborated upon in Confluence, we brought these functional requirements to life in the black & white prototype. Devoid of the colours and imagery of UI design, this ‘skeleton’ shows how each section of the portal would flow through to its interrelated areas.

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With an instantly and internationally recognisable brand and name, Thomson Reuters had certain branding and style requirements that Digital Garden had to incorporate into the interface elements of the design.

As with most digital solutions we create, the most-visited or used screen is what we design first - normally the homepage or dashboard of the project. Once approved, the concept we create sets the design direction and styles for the subsequently designed internal screens.

As we had already fleshed-out in the requirements and prototyped, the homepage of the portal was to feature a prominent search bar. The UI design of the homepage conformed with Thomson Reuters brand guidelines to not overuse detailed close-ups of people, but instead use abstract imagery and colours.

The bold Thomson Reuters-orange we chose to use on the homepage’s search bar surround ensured the central call-to-action and principle of the portal front and centre: to help and support customers.

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04. User Interface (UI) Design

The solution comes to life.

05. Agile Development

Staggered, simultaneous UI design and development sprints

For the Thomson Reuters customer portal project, we worked in an agile-based development approach.

Based upon the approved feature requirements and prototype, the project’s technical lead created the technical specification document. The spec outlines the exact implementation approach the project’s development team needs to follow to properly execute the frontend and CMS/backend requirements of the client and their content creators.

The development process ran to a sprint methodology, whereby we batch UI design the screens and features to be developed by the developers in the next fortnightly sprint. While that work is being developed, our UI designers created the next batch of designs that we then completed a feedback loop on with the client, before getting those into development for the next round of development.

At the end of each sprint, the digital producer visited Thomson Reuters in Pyrmont, Sydney for a development release meeting. This is where we walk the client project team through the development work achieved and released from the just-concluded sprint.

Release meetings demonstrate incremental development progress to the client and allow for them to begin initial user acceptance testing (UAT) of both the frontend and CMS backend implementation.

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06. CMS Training & Content Entry

An important part of our work goes unseen by the public audience of the digital solutions we create: the content management system (CMS).

We advocate the open source CMS framework Drupal as our technology of choice for most of the projects we do. It is a content-centric and user-friendly framework that allows the CMS user and content creator to easily publish all sorts of varying content types.

Like any CMS, Drupal takes some fundamentals training to understand the logic and flow of the framework. Our training of the client on how to administer and grow the solutions we create is an important part of the step.

For Thomson Reuters’ customer portal, the challenge was that it was a large site that needed to be populated with a lot of content - and fast. The project’s digital producer Paul conducted a CMS training session with 9 stakeholders, each logged-in to the new portal’s Drupal framework.

Thomson Reuters’ content creators and own project lead being empowered with Drupal know-how means the client can be self-sufficient in continuing to create and evolve the stores of training and support content the portal was built to serve.

Empowering our clients with Drupal training and know-how.

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07. The completed MVP portal

Key customer portal features upon the launch of the MVP include:

• Multi-regional configuration, allowing for both the Australian and New Zealand sites’ content to be administered via the same Drupal CMS framework

• Role-based content creation and permissions workflow for publishing content onsite

• Landing pages for all Thomson Reuters (Legal) products and platforms, with tabbed views of product-related training materials such as Guides, Videos and Updates

• A gated support login for Premium Care customers

• An Updates & Alerts section, serving as a blog on product updates and a way to communicate any technical issues to Thomson Reuters’ customers

An evolving, living digital solution

Digital Garden is continuing to work with Thomson Reuters in 2018 to build on the great results of customer portal, roll-out new features, and build upon the MVP.

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