The Problem
The original sales document was an elaborate PowerPoint presentation that couldn’t easily be taken off-site in one self-contained unit. Our business partners were insisting on another structure.
Analysis
To ascertain a baseline before making decisions on the new platform, we audited the existing sales experience, took a content inventory and had account managers walk us though a sales presentation.
After that, we sat in a room with stacks of post-it notes and did card sorting exercises.
Structural Decisions
Microsite or App?
To address the pain points of the sales team, we weighed out the pros and cons of each option. Creating a hybrid app in Adobe’s Digital Publishing Suite would make the structural build much more difficult. However, since an internet connection wasn’t always an option, a microsite wouldn’t be practical.
Internal Structure?
HTML in a shell, ePub, or a combination of the two? We sketched out several options on our whiteboard exploring several structures within the digital publishing suite. In the end, my proposition of all DPS with a special HTML templated library of sales samples won out. Logistically, it was the easiest to update while also lowering the risk of error input during each quarter-end update.
Wireframing & More
To ascertain a baseline before making decisions on the new platform, we audited the existing sales experience, took a content inventory and had account managers walk us though a sales presentation.
After that, we sat in a room with stacks of post-it notes and did card sorting exercises. Anything we weren’t sure how to categorize, went on a list of questions for the sales folks.
Once that was done, we began wireframing navigation and specific functionality options. Because we were pushing the limits of Adobe DPS (at the time), we had an Adobe developer to consult periodically during this process.
Approval, Testing, and Design
During the several iterations of testing navigational prototypes, my colleague, Rob, began working on the design.
Once the navigation was approved and a couple of design options were settled upon, we had a minor setback…
Monkey Wrenches
What would a major corporate initiative be without a few surprises here and there? We were making a pretty good pace with the project when the corporate brand was refreshed and our project was going to be used as a new brand stress-test. Luckily, our master designer easily incorporated changes into his designs.
The needs of the stress-test kept changing as we were building out the navigation, designing pages and working toward our first Beta test.
Betas and More
At last we completed most of the build. HTML sample client libraries were built out during the beta testing since there were more than 200 samples to be created.
The beta product was tested by selected sales agents who had to be trained on the new structure and functionality. Final release was successful.
My Role: brainstorming, structural determination, functionality testing within DPS, page build-out, testing