Sciential Dashboard

An organization-facing intranet for academic journal editors

This is the full case study!

2-min summary here

Skills demonstrated

User Research
Testing
Affinity Mapping
Ideation
Fast Turnaround
Mockup
Prototyping
Iteration
Interview
Information Architecture

Platform

Web - Desktop

Main Tools

Figma
Google meet
Google Suite
Zoom

Date Range

Nov 1 2020
to Nov 23 2020

Intro

Sciential, an academic journal, needed an infrastructure upgrade. They needed to communicate with each other, organize their files, set schedules and so on, but they had to work with many different platforms like Google Drive, Facebook Messenger and many others, which was very annoying.

For a class assignment, my team of 5 wanted to design an intranet. One of us knew the senior editor of the journal, who let us know about the problems they were facing. It was a match made in heaven.

Research

Before designing anything, I look at what’s already out there. Surprisingly, there were no well-known academic journal intranets. Academic journals are usually large-scale organizations, and their software and inner workings are either beyond a one-stop intranet type solution, or highly proprietary.

To get further information about what the Sciential team needed, we designed a questionnaire to get some information:

Ideation

I got our team together for a brainstorming session. Based on the data, we all came up with ideas to solve their problems using "how might we" questions. This is one of many methods of ideation brainstorming.

Ideas are nothing if we don't know how to organize and use them. As such, we organized our ideas into a prioritization matrix. Marking each idea under a main category of features was helpful too. Here, we see that the best bang-for-buck was focusing on coordination and file management.

It was time to put these ideas into designs!

Low-fi designs and testing

For our low fidelity, I made a sitemap with all the features in the right places. This is crucial to make sure all the required features make it into a coherent information architecture.

I made some rough sketches for element layouts, and built a Balsamiq prototype. We also came up with a few tasks for our testers to accomplish to ensure that they went through all the required flows.

Test Results  - Senior Editor

The good:

  • Liked the idea of the intranet
  • Liked the whiteboard feature
  • Understood icons and most labels
  • Understood the site layout

Changes to implement:

  • Include a profile menu
  • Flesh out chat bar
  • Add "attached documents" feature
  • Flesh out scheduling tool
  • ... and much more

Mid-fi designs and testing

After the feedback and some time in Figma, I made our Mid-Fidelity.​ This version was mostly clickable and had demonstrations of some features, such as chat and editorial review approval.

Test Results  - Senior Editor and Illustrator

The good:

  • Excited to see progress
  • Imagines it being productive
  • Likes "linked documents"
  • Likes document-specific chat

Changes to implement:

  • Add review procss for editors
  • Demonstrate how chat works
  • How document editorial phases work
  • Add a files pending review panel
  • ... and much more

With the valuable feedback, they gave us some words of encouragement!

“I really like the system, I can imagine performing all the tasks I’d need to..."

“Right now we have a sea of docs and folders… but this intranet is so much nicer!”

Hi-fi designs and testing

Incorporating the last set of feedback, I created our High-Fidelity! This included all the aesthetic and branding, such as the logo and colors.

Lessons Learned