Client: Microsoft
System Requirement: Web Development
Technology Platform: Sharepoint Server

Description:
Microsoft Release Operations is responsible for the processes that drive how all Microsoft products are released to market, including compliance with legal and business requirements. The group had a window of 3-4 months to deliver on a commitment to provide a comprehensive web site for all internal consumers and owners of their services that would:

• Provide a single entry point for all users,
• Centralize and clearly identify essential information,
• Offer easy navigation to find the desired information quickly,
• Enable information integrity (secure, current, accurate, accessible), and
• Allow systematic content management without external dependencies.

The scope extended to any and every release tool, service, group, knowledge base, etc. across the entire lifecycle of a product developed anywhere within the Microsoft company. Several existing sites were to be re-architected and migrated onto the platform for this new portal. The portal itself needed to be easily scaled up to accommodate future migrations and new content creation.

History:
Release Operations had attempted this effort several times in the past. The group had failed or been sidetracked by priority shifts, poor design, and a lack of understanding around how their users wanted to consume their services. The group was fatigued with redoing this work every few years and then reengaging the user base with their latest attempt.

Solution:
As a Certified Microsoft Partner and experienced solution provider with SharePoint Server, Mantis proved to be the right choice to deliver this project. Mantis utilized a user-centered design philosophy, underpinning all design and production efforts with empirical research around the user base. The project was broken into phases: discovery and analysis, synthesis and usability, and lastly production and experience testing. This approach could easily be layered over Microsoft’s rigid internal software development lifecycle. Each phase was guided by a senior product designer, interfacing between key stakeholders, end users, and the project team.

Phase I: Discovery and Analysis

The Mantis team was immersed in Microsoft’s release domain in order to discover and document how things worked on an as-is basis:

Contextual inquiry (observation of users in their normal work context, revealing how the domain operates and exposing inefficiencies & pain points) was employed to quickly understand how release system owners operated as well as how end users consumed those systems and services.

• Needs analysis focus groups were conducted with target users.
• These were supplemented with a follow-up surveys for clarification of difficult concepts.

There were three resulting products:

Provisional personas - the compressed project schedule did not permit full person creation, so provisional personas (example on the left) were utilized. This short document crisply captures user goals and behavior so that the key stakeholders and production team can better understand and identify with who they are trying to reach. All project requirements need to fulfill the goals of the personas. Any requirement that does not can then be dismissed as nonessential.

Preliminary findings report Qualitative data from interviews, focus groups, and the survey were converted to empirical indicators (trends, identifiable pain points, measurably broken or improvable pathways, etc.).

Project story A narrative description of the proposed web portal was composed. This would be used as a guide to render low fidelity prototyping, aid requirements gathering, and build the critical information architecture.

Phase II: Synthesis and Usability High level requirements were collected and filtered through the products of the discovery and analysis phase. The result was the “Golden Five” – the set of qualities that the portal must meet (neither fall short of or expand beyond) in order to be useful, a navigation strategy to rest on the site’s information architecture, and a set of low fidelity prototypes. All components of this phase were positively validated directly with the same set of users and stakeholders that participated in the discovery and analysis phase.

The “Golden Five”

1. High level resources to help plan a release
2. Task-oriented guides for actively releasing and navigating the release space
3. Critical news, especially regarding tool or service downtime
4. Immediate access to help and support
5. A picture of the complete end-to-end release lifecycle, from product idea to a consumer receiving the product

The navigation strategy
User behavior necessitated that the information architecture be accessible through multiple mental models. Content would be centralized in a low fidelity prototype.

The low fidelity prototype

From a purpose-oriented wireframe, more detailed models were derived. The wireframe, home page, basic content page, and strategic left navigation are displayed at left.

Phase III: production and experience testing

The site skeleton was built out on SharePoint Server 2007. All the content from the group of old sites was updated and migrated onto the new architecture. New content was then flowed onto the site. The architecture scaled so easily that six times the amount of new content initially identified could be added for launch. Though the left navigation was significantly expanded, the release lifecycle image had to be scaled down – early testing showed such strong user interest in the draft image that it was spun off as a separate project. A simplified image was prepared for launch while the feature-rich image was put through the development lifecycle.

Users and stakeholders were gathered a final time for user experience testing (incorporated into the formal user acceptance test required by the SDLC). Input was collected and analyzed. Group branding and minor interaction revisions were applied through a cascading stylesheet.

The Microsoft Center of Release Excellence (CORE) Release Operations web portal was launched a week early, meeting or exceeding project scope and quality expectations in all areas.

Because of the dedicated time and effort invested in user research and product design, all project requirements were well understood and all non-requirements were easily cast off. Low priority features were identified early and scheduled for future releases. Within the clear and narrow scope, it became possible to intelligently streamline production and test time. All participants had step-by-step visibility into the process at each phase. Users felt like their needs were heard and stakeholders felt like their involvement gave them skin in the game.