MARTA Sharepoint Site
Responsibilities
Design, Architecture, UX Strategy, Research
Background
The Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority (MARTA) Federal and State Grants department provides grant fund updates and statuses to the whole organization as well as it process hundreds of requests a year for site usage.
Objective
Redesign the SharePoint site to create an easily accessible hub for all grant-related information and allow internal submissions for site requests.
Phase 01
Research + Strategy
Usability Research
Interviewing the targeted users and understanding the need for a designated SharePoint site. This uncovered many pain points that users experience with the current process for accessing information and submitting incidental use request forms.
Information Architecture
Given the failure of previous SharePoint sites, I wanted to establish a strong foundation for this new site to make it logically structured for sustained organization even past my time at the company. With the results of my interviews, I created a sitemap to catalog core pages, and identified the audience for each page.
Phase 02
Design Execution
Design Exploration
New to SharePoint Development, I explored realistic design styles and layouts to complete within the time constraint I had given the length of the internship. I settled with a grid layout setting the home page to be made in a table structure, and designing tiles that followed the MARTA style guide and made navigation very simple to even first time visitors.
Data Presentation
A major part of the project requirements was to create a dashboard for visitors to quickly learn about grant statuses and what grants were on the radar for the organization to benefit from. The decision was made to use an online excel sheet to actively update the KPI dashboard to display the key indicators for how grants were performing as the year went on.
Though there proved to be some limitations from Excel and SharePoint, we successfully displayed a readable format that users quickly benefited from.
Phase 03
CONTENT + HandOFF
File Migration
There was a lack of organization and consistency in the previous SharePoint sites so based on my initial interviews I designed a hierarchy that would but logical for users and easily searchable/displayed from the website. Using this structure I cleaned up all project-relevant files and nested them into their own directories that could easily be sorted
Training Material
With the new features we added to the site, we wanted to provide some level of hand-off guidance for users that needed the extra help. With the help of MARTA Grant employees, I recorded and produced quick How-To videos that guided the use of the newly automated Incidental Use forms.
Departure
As the end of my time in Atlanta drew near, I prepared to handoff the SharePoint site to the department’s full control. In this process I left behind a document outlining the style guide for any future changes to be made to the site from a design standpoint. From a technical standpoint the department updated their sheets as designed to keep the visitors informed on grant progress.
Next Steps
With more time on this project, I would familiarize myself more with PowerBI in efforts to clean up the automation, usability, and overall visual design of the data, as well as contribute more to the training library.