01 My involvement & Challenge
What It was about?
When I was working on the main Gordic web redesign, I've discovered via analytics a user needs to visit the support page. They wanted to get the law updates and they were actively seeking the best practices. When I highlighted this trend, the leaders of the company told me that they would like to solve this problem in the future. After some time the project manager called me and asked If I would help them design a new Support & learning port. We had a good relationship and I knew enough about the products and company. Naturally, I liked the idea that I can actually solve the problem that I've discovered.
- The Gordic had a highly educated team dedicated to establishing the process best-practices. Everything was is connected to law is quite complex. We had to structure the portal in a way that would represent the real world, but somehow simplify it to make it usable.
- The second challenge was that the Visual design should be delivered by the external company and they had a delay. I had to find a way how to deliver it even though we were blocked by them.
02 Research
Identifying problems
Initially we had discussion what are the most frequent problems, what people often asks or what people don't understand on expert trainings, what is confusing on the legislative, where people are making the mistakes, what is causing the biggest pains in the industry. We gathered the data from the emails, feedback from trainings and expert knowledge of dedicated team. Based on that we together came up with the structure proposal.
I went through some existing web to find out how they present the information, and how the legislativ is actually structured and how the changes are presented to public. For this kind of project is important to adopt the know habits (Jakob’s Law) of the target audience. The bold changes could caused more issues than benefits. I've took the layout inspiration from other Gordic webs with similar content and from Czech and European union institution.
03 Planning & iterations
What will be the structure?
We didn't have a much time, I convinced the team to go in small-weekly iterations. This approached has proved it's worth in the previous project, so I've designed in the same way. I started with homepage to demonstrate the structure and then go the details. I've planned the review every week in the early morning before my normal job. First two iteration I've done in mid level fidelity. Meanwhile the graphic studio came up with the visual proposal for the main Gordic web. Even though it wasn't perfect at that time, I've proposed the idea, that I will consume the visual style. The rest of the project I've done directly in high fidelity.
04 Design iterations
Homepage
Based on the research I've come up with the information structure composed from four pillars — Legislative, Methodic tutorials, Methodic for download and Best practices. There were three main usecases.
- User will be looking for some specific law update, so they will use directly the search option(1).
- User will come there to proactively check, whether there is something new in the legislation or other pillars(2).
- User will come there to see what are the deadlines in this months and what needs to be done(3).
- The last part was informing users about the legislation's most frequent questions which users actively asked the team(4).
Legislation pages
When it comes to Czech legislative, you will find out that it is quite complicated. The section Laws, regulations, Czech accounting standards represent the real categorization. When important deadlines are coming, people start to look for detail information about the procedures. Because of that there was section with most searched articles to help you navigate through extensive content. Monitoring was the real customer needs so we provided summary of Legislative changes and option to set the alerting via email.
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01 Legislation 02 Actual Laws -
03 Law change watcher + newsletter sign up 04 Law detail -
05 Law search 06 Sharing highlighted text -
07 Search results 08 Active menu
Statements pages
Statements were special part of the web where users could read the official statements about some law issues and find tips or article that stress out some insidiousness. User is able to use search and filtering in order to be able to quickly find specific article or just check the statements list.
Newsletter and alerting
People in the accounting or in the law are stressed by the deadlines. If you miss it, you or your company can get expensive fine. My wife is accountant and I know it from my own experiences how hard job it is. I wanted to help them at least little bit. We provided the simple alerting. Every month you've received the digest of the updates and overview of the upcoming the deadlines to your email box.
05 Conclusion
What did I learn?
I've enjoyed this project a lot and I got experiences from the area which I would probably never get. But I find out that I wanted to have bigger ownership, to discover new needs, and based on that adjust the product. I enjoyed a lot the autonomy and impact I had on the company. These factors drive my passion. This I didn't have in my full-time job and this project helped me to realize, that I need to find a different job.
I enjoyed a lot the autonomy and impact I had on the company
I was proud that I managed to finish this support and learning portal faster than the graphic studio managed to finish the main Gordic web.
All information in the case study is my own and does not reflect the views or opinions of Gordic.