Pland: Event Management Portal
Description:
Pland is an all-in-one event planning, management, and personnel portal custom built to fit the needs of cyber operations administrators and personnel managers
Why you should care:
The previous solution to this product was nicknamed “Satans Jenga”. Our team took an antiquated excel-based operation and turned it into a cutting edge planning portal, slashing the time of task completion by ~50%
My Roles:
- High Level Product Research
- User Research
- Usability Studies & Testing
- UI Design
Client:
Millennium Corporation’s NSA Certified Red Team
Goal:
Reduce vital time, confusion, and miscommunication in planning and managing highly sensitive information regarding events and personnel
Outcome:
Reduced time of task completion by ~50%, eliminated conflicting schedule overlap, and created a centralized hub to streamline operations
Discovery Phase & The MVP (Minimum Viable Product)
Our team leveraged several initial meetings to workshop ideas and shape what an MVP would look like. It became abundantly clear, very quickly, that the most direct solution was to create a scheduling and event management portal to replace the current method of using an extra large piece of printer paper with a microscopic excel sheet, infamously nicknamed “Satan’s Jenga”. While the details of why and how are classified due to the arena (DoD Cyber Security), the picture paints itself: a large team working from a printed muli-color excel sheet is not exactly a recipe for success.
But who will use it?
As the leading UX (and UI) Designer on our small but robust software development team, I got to work. The first order of business was to dive in head-first and analyze every angle of commonly used scheduling tools, the current solutions largest use cases, and dig out the goals and pain points that accompanied.
I worked closely with stakeholders and the software engineering manager to define parameters and scope, MVP requirements, and any constraints on potential features.
To harmonize the internal development team and align with the vision of the client/stakeholders, I developed a persona representing the primary user. The user research showed an overwhelming but not unexpected set of pain points. Some of the common themes were disorganization, little to no visibility, and the fact that the schedule was not a living document
Crafting the UI
We brainstormed ideas for what a successful UI would look like and I began wireframing, loosely creating the information architecture, and building low-fidelty mockups to bring the team to a testable solution point and keep the conversation flowing with stakeholders.
The Solution Space
I gradually increased the fidelity of the UI solution after several rounds of gathering feedback by talking and walking through the ideas with users and stakeholders.
We included a grid structure in the schedule view as a nod to the excel solution with the primary thinking that widespread adoption would be more likely (Jakob’s Law) if the new product was familiar to users
Our team delivered an MVP solution after 3 months of consistent iterations and user testing. The goal we set out to achieve was reduce time of task completion, confusion, and miscommunication in planning and managing highly sensitive information regarding events and personnel. We saw a ~50% reduction of time to complete key tasks like scheduling events, managing personnel, and watched as operations dramatically improved by implementing a real-time solution.
The First Release (v1)
After the release and adoption of the MVP solution, we set out to accommodate additional feature requests and improve the lives of our users further. Some of the major features included in v1 were:
- An event creation wizard to help guide users through the process of creating a new event and adding it to the schedule
- A reports page that included important metrics and data related to the events and operations
- A customizable dashboard so administrators could have at-a-glance insights
Every two weeks our team would gather with stakeholders, users, and other client representatives to discuss the product and garner feedback. This was instrumental in the success of this product and I was extremely fortunate to be able to interact with end-users at such a predictable interval. This by-weekly meeting was in addition to other scheduled meetings and reviews for usability testing sessions and feature brainstorming.
The Second Release (v2)
- A Smart Schedule to help event planners easily manage personnel without conflicting dates
- The ability to add new personnel to an event directly in the event creation wizard
- A new workflow that included limited permissions for different roles and user types
Two of the most challenging aspects of the v2 product was implementing a smart schedule and a workflow that had limited functionality based on user-roles.
The scheduling tool allowed our users to select people based on filtered classifications, their role, and of course their availability. To aid in this, I often create simple process visualizations by hand digitally or using one of my favorite tools, Miro. I have found this to be one of the most efficient ways to get engineers, stakeholders, and any other non design-focused group thinking like a designer.
At the beginning of this project the focus was not so much on roles and permissions as it was getting a working schedule solution out the door fast. Once the value and usability gained traction, we deconstructed the user groups and roles AFTER many of the features were in place and created limited functionality user flows. Obviously this was not an ideal implementation of roles and permissions but it had to be done and our team did a stellar job of delivering digging out the needed information and running with it. We aligned the goals and tasks of each different user type and created a seamless experience that did not skip a beat.
