DICOM
CANADA
PROJECT
OVERVIEW
⇀ The Dicom Transportation Group (DTG) had a number of track & trace and shipping databases across the base business and the mergers and acquisitions (M&A).
⇀ Each company had separate track & trace and shipping databases, which were also outdated. To provide a seamless experience, Dicom wanted a centralized place to better manage the visibility for their group of companies.
⇀ The solution was to integrate everything in one single place.
And so, this got translated into a web and native array of dashboards.
LET'S TALK
ABOUT IT
01. DEVELOPMENT TEAM
I acted as the Product Designer on a team of 12 (Devs, Q&A, PM), working closely with my team and with the client’s team, on a daily basis.
As everyone was remote, we were collaborating through tools like Slack, Jira, Invision, Hangouts, Zoom.
As for role specifics, I took the project through all of its phases (initial documentation and research, early concepts, wireframes, prototypes,
high-fidelity designs). By closely collaborating with the developers, I made sure that all the functionalities were properly implemented and tested, as per the designs, and as per the documentation I put together.
02. PAIN POINTS, FEATURES & PROJECT TIMELINE
As mentioned above, the main and major pain point was given by the multitude of applications and databases. Each entity had its own application & database. Besides that, all those systems were outdated and lacking in highly desired features.
Because of that, Dicom wanted us to build a new product from scratch, which would centralize all of their companies & their databases while also offering a plethora of new features for Dicom Ops, Admins & clients.
From start to finish, the product was delivered within 2 years, summing up over 270 approved screens, and more in early concepts and wireframes.
03. INITIAL DOCUMENTATION & RESEARCH
The team received from Dicom an impressive collection of documents, which helped us understand the scope of the project, what they wanted to achieve, and how.
The documents contained both business requirements and flows, as well as tech requirements and flows. The initial task was to go through all of these and make sure everybody is on the same page before moving forward. Taking notes, drawing early concepts/ideas and close client collaboration was something that I also did during this step.
04. INTERVIEWS
These were conducted on multiple fronts since the platform would eventually be used by people from Dicom, and by their customers.
My interview process was thorough because I wanted to understand the core pain points for all parties involved in this process.
The interviews involved the following parties:
⇀ Dicom employees (management included)
⇀ large scale shippers
⇀ mid scale shippers
⇀ small scale shippers
05. USER STORIES & USE CASES
I used user stories in order to achieve maximum coverage of all use cases.
I was able to identify edge cases and provide the best experience across the board between Dicom Admins & Ops, high volume clients as well as low volume clients even before diving deep into the design process.
06. WIREFRAMES
With the core concepts in place, it was time to layout the initial user flows through wireframes & prototypes. This guided the team’s initial development and architecture as well as provided the client with an early iterative process.
User testing was also introduced during this step, as it was essential do that from early stages. I have also repurposed the user stories that I have written to serve as tests.
08. HI-FI TIME
Having strong branding already in place, it was time to make our wireframes come to life, add that touch of color. We were also able to further define the user experience.
With large forms, the state of each input is carefully controlled and visually enhanced to allow users to easily navigate with both keyboard or mouse.
Using the corporate colors we were able to introduce a stateful nature to the application which guided users through the process of creating a shipment.
This ensured a great experience whether you are an avid shipper or a complete novice.
The platform was developed to fulfill the needs of Dicom Ops, as well as extremely large scale shippers and the one off shippers.
Every item on the screen is a well thought out necessity to provide balance between form and function.
FINAL
WORDS?
This product was a truly new take on an outdated system, which ultimately leveraged the performance and functionality that modern technology and smart development was able to provide.
It took our team 2 years to actually build, test and deliver the product, and it turned out to be a totally great experience.
Below you can find some stats, based on the data we retrieved during alpha, and beta testing.
©2021 ROBERT BERKI SENDS HIS REGARDS
SONG OF THE DAY: EVERYTHING2ME