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E-Marketplace Case
Study
Introduction
Spring 2001
UEA Team Members
- Architecture Phase (September - December 2000): Paul L. (Lead), Anthony Hand, Lija B.
- Construction Phase (January - March 2001): Anthony Hand (Lead), Lija B.
Client
Description
eBiz Consultants, Inc., worked with E-Marketplace, Inc., to develop a Web site to improve the new business partnership identification and information gathering process. This solution, My E-Marketplace, serves as the premier offering by providing a comprehensive set of services, business partnership identification, and collaboration tools. The audience for this site includes both Selling Organizations (e.g., small businesses) who will post promising products; and Buying Organizations (e.g., large enterprises) who will search the site for opportunities to satisfy their business development goals.
Challenges
E-Marketplace was a green field project. We started from scratch with no legacy systems, business processes, or brand perceptions. While sometimes an enviable position, legacy nothing also presents its own challenges as we moved through the Architecture Phase:
- Value and Branding: The client's value proposition and branding requirements were not fully understood through much of the Architecture Phase.
- User Requirements: For a variety of reasons, it was difficult to conduct user requirements research with the intended primary users. One of the client's intended early customer's provided eBiz Consultants with limited access to indirect or secondary users, such as executives and librarians. Direct access to significant numbers of rank and file staff involved in new business opportunity identification and follow through proved elusive.
- Business Requirements: As this was a brand new company with a brand new web offering, eBiz Consultants was essentially building not only a web application, but also helping to build the company and define its business processes. Also, as this was a rapidly growing company, it was challenging to keep track of new client staff and their responsibilities.
- Data Requirements: From the beginning, it was evident that much of the interface and interaction design would need to be driven by the kinds of data E-Marketplace wanted to capture for each business opportunity posting. However, the client was not forthcoming in providing this data nor the posting classification taxonomy. Related data issues revolved around assigning organization and user privileges, what data to collect for user profiles, and private data E-Marketplace wanted to collect about its member organizations (such as CRM-related data).
- Technology: In the Architecture Phase, eBiz Consultants' technology team committed the project to Java applets for the web front end of several applications which presented multiple user experience challenges during the Construction Phase.
Solutions
- Value and Branding: The UEA team made multiple contributions, including naming the "eAgent" feature, and advocating for user-oriented system requirements as they applied to the functionality of certain site features.
- User Requirements: The UEA team worked closely with the Account Planning teammate to identify target users, develop the interview methodology, and analyze user's comments.
- Business Requirements: eBiz Consultants committed early in the Architecture Phase to developing a set of functional specifications documents. (For better or worse, not all projects do this.) This helped greatly to ensure that everyone approached the project from a common base of understanding. Throughout the project, the UEA team lead discussions of business requirements and helped manage client expectations as to how the web application would fulfill and exceed those requirements. Also, by the end of the Architecture Phase, two client representatives emerged as primary day-to-day liaisons with eBiz Consultants. The two individuals were well organized and highly dependable. They brought a great deal of continuity and stability to the working relationship during the Construction Phase.
- Data Requirements: The UEA team ended up becoming the primary force working with the client to develop data specifications for postings. Data requirements sometimes evolved considerably with each revision of the wireframes as the client's needs changed and compromises needed to be developed with the technical and creative approaches. The lead UEA worked very closely with the main client representatives to keep all in sync and manage the degree of change.
- Technology: The UEA team worked closely with the technology team to maximize the user experience based upon the capabilities and limitations of the backend systems. As one UEA teammate has basic Java programming capabilities, he was able to assist by both providing more Java-friendly interaction designs for the posting input forms and search screens, and providing limited assistance in solving some minor technical issues.
Approach
- User Requirements: Led by Maureen K., an Account Planner from the New York office. Interviews ran from September through November. Maureen communicated with the UEA team frequently, and wrote numerous interim findings documents as well as a final deliverable.
- Business Requirements:
- Use Case Workshops: The Director of User Experience, Paul L., conducted a workshop with client and key eBiz Consultants representatives to gather an initial set of use cases and their descriptions.
- Functional Specifications: The UEA team turned this material into a set of high level functional specifications, then spent three days during the Architecture Phase revising the documents with internal and client representatives. This set of documents continued to be revised during the Construction Phase in conferences with client representatives, typically before the corresponding set of wireframes were developed. [ Read a sample Actor description and use case ]
- Site Map: The original draft site map was created as a direct product of the functional specifications. First, the UEA team went through the primary and alternate scenarios to craft page flow diagrams. They then extracted a more familiar hierarchical representation of a site map from these diagrams. Each major content category was given a unique identifying number which carried over to the wireframe development. [ See a sample Site Map (hierarchical style) ]
- Wireframes: Twelve web pages were initially wireframed for the Architecture Phase. During the Construction Phase, the lead UEA delivered wireframes in sets corresponding to a related set of functionality. Nearly every wireframe of a web page was accompanied by a set of "notes" identifying the purpose of the page, the presentation rules and data requirements, related use cases, and describing the controls and links presented on the page. The technology team came to rely heavily on these detailed notes. All wireframed pages were given a unique ID corresponding to the site map and page templates. [ See samples: 1. Log On Page Flow Diagram, 2. My E-Marketplace Home Page Wireframe, 3. My E-Marketplace Home Page WireframeNotes ]
- Wireframes Tracking Sheet: This document helps internal and client teammates keep track of the pages, templates, and ID codes assigned to each page in the site. It also supplies the intended HTML page title for each page as well as the corresponding contextual Help page. [ See a sample Wireframe Tracking Sheet ]
- Privilege Matrix: As this is a transactional
site, the site is completely personalized. Organizational and user-specific
privileges drive the personalization engine as it dynamically prepares
each individual page for a user. The wireframes identified all available
elements for a given page, then the privilege dependencies for each
specific element. The UEA team, working closely with the technical team,
led the development of this matrix. [ See a sample Privilege
Matrix ]
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