Digital Trust Manager
About the project
Overview:
It’s an intelligent online assessment tool designed for organizations to assess different areas of their business, measure their maturity levels and provide recommendations to improve their processes as they move towards digitization and minimize digital risks. The tool was further improved to be customizable and used as value propositions when offering services to clients.
My Role:
Product design, Visual design, Application Development and Management,
Design Process
Competitive Analysis: The idea behind the tool was not new but the concept of targeted assessments was not very common. After understanding the intended purpose of the project, we have checked other available tools in the market including those from the firm’s competitors.
- Most of the tools we found in the market at the time were very generic and does not target specific areas of a business.
- The reports are very simple and does not provide enough recommendations to the users.
- Navigating to some of the tools are not straightforward.
Brainstorming: We have conducted brainstorming sessions with client facing auditors, managers and partners to define what features we need to build, user demographics and target languages to meet the goals of the business.
- Secured
- Personalized
- Easy to navigate
- Detailed reports
- Informative recommendations
- Paid features
Wireframing: Based on what has been agreed in the meetings, i sketched some screens to visualize my idea and designed the 2 sets of wireframes 2 different concepts and presented them to the stakeholders.
Mockups: After a few discussions and getting the approval for the idea, I designed the mockups in Adobe Photoshop, presented them to the business owners and collected their feedback.
Prototype: I created the prototype using Axure RP and have them tested by a team of QAs and client-facing consultants to represent the target users. I gathered the feedback and modified the designs accordingly and after a few iterations, approval was released and we prepared for development.
Branding and User Interface
The product is owned by PwC, a well-established Big 4 firm. Knowing this, it is quick to understand that they already have very strict set of rules and guidelines with regards to how their brand should be presented in the product.
So the first step for me was to work with their marketing and brands team to gather all the resources i need from their brand library.
From a large collection of assets, I picked 2 color palettes, 1 light and 1 dark, sets of icons and incorporated their brand guidelines keeping in mind the requirement of a simple minimal layout.
Designs
6 months after a successful launch, we have designed a dark version and applied the 2nd concept previously presented during the initial stages. We have worked with a design agency for the dark version and my role was more on providing guidance and direction. Please note some texts in these designs have been deliberately blurred out for data privacy purposes.
Application Development Management
Being a developer myself, I was able to make the transition from design to development less complex. While designing the User Interface of the application, i was already thinking of which front-end components to use, what data and how they will be pulled from the back-end and the logical flow of the code.
I was able to guide the developers and even contributed in coding myself.
01
Application architecture
For the application, we have used different 3rd party components, external libraries and integrated with a payment gateway. In a nutshell, i created this document to define different layers of the application and which layer connects to the external components.
02
Process flow
I created the process flow diagram to translate the user experience design to a document more friendly to the developers and testers,
03
Cross functional diagram
As the application is integrated with different systems, a cross functional diagram was required to define which step of the process do the application communicate with the external systems. For example, in which part of the journey does the application call the payment gateway API and what happens when it gets the response.
04
Database definition
We used relational database and drawing the tables and their relations in a diagram during planning helped our developers understand the data structure and map them to the application.
05
Server architecture
I designed this diagram to understand how the environment will be setup for the application. Development, staging, production and how they are
06
Agile methodology
To track the progress of deliverables we followed the Scrumban methodology where we combined the rituals of Scrum (sprint planning, daily standups, reviews and retrospectives) while viewing the stories and tasks from Azure DevOps’ kanban board where we used cards to visually represent the stories and move the cards through their respective stages in the board.
Quality Assurance Testing
We have 2 quality assurance testers in the team. Their main role was to make sure every release has showstoppers. Bugs reported are discussed and prioritized.
User Acceptance Testing
The application was soft launched to a number of client-facing consultants who represented different industries and areas of the business.
Results:
The project was launch on time on September 2019 and helped increase numbers in client engagements. With the project’s success,
it is now used as an accelerator and added as value services when rendering services to clients. The Digital Trust Manager has been
used by firms in the UK, Australia, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar and business and government entitiesin the UAE.