DELIVERABLES
BACKGROUND
Dynamic Deliverables, simply put are documents/template created by Citrix Consulting, with dynamic data entered into the blank fields based off of the data entered into that project by the Partner. The reason the Partner community was so interested in these documents is because with the ever evolving platforms and products at Citrix, it was extremely hard for Partners to stay up to date on their education.
CHALLANGE
There were three main challenges for this feature. The first item was to figure out how to deliver these documents to our Partners, primarily referring to the format format. Second, how to maintain these documents and the ability to allow for easy changes to them that do not require the developers to have to manage them. And last but not least, how to add this new section into the existing site structure.
REQUIREMENTS PLEASE.
The base requirements were that Project Accelerator needed to be able to take the data from X project, auto populate X template with that data and allow the user to download the deliverable in X format, such as .docx, .ppt, .vsd and .xls. The requirements were really vague. This was often true with most of the requirements I received for feature requests for Project Accelerator. I had two options, I could try to pull them out of the product owner, or I could do some recon, brainstorm with a few of the brilliant people, and come up with a solution to present to the product owner. I chose the latter.
A LITTLE BREAKDOWN
IF YOU BUILD IT, HE WILL COME
He might come, but he won’t stay if it doesn’t meet his needs. I conducted user research to determine what the users expected this to be. The resounding answer was they wanted to be able to download these docs and easily edit them to suit their needs. They also wanted to be informed when a new document was available and when an existing one was updated.
TO FILTER, OR NOT TO FILTER?
Personally, I’m a big fan of being able to filter, but if the user won’t use it, it’s just clutter on the page. Dynamic deliverables are broken up into 4 sections, many file types and supported different products. Also, some would be dynamic, while others wouldn’t. The other important item here was to determine how much detail the user wanted regarding the document.
LEAVE NO STONE UNTURNED
There were 24 documents slated of the initial release of Plus+, Aside from filtering, pagination, dynamic docs vs. manual docs, It was extremely important to make sure the development team was able to understand all the working pieces of this moving part. To ensure this, and to sell the design to the owner, I created this redline documentation
DYNAMIC DELIVERABLES STORYBOARD
TELLING THE STORY THROUGH SKETCHES
