Queensland Treasury
Breadcrumb Digital assisted Queensland Treasury in the delivery of its new SharePoint business system, Nexus. Adhering to a user experience focused design, development and testing process resulted in the creation of a strategically important business system that has experienced a strong user adoption.
The client
Queensland Treasury is the state government body responsible for state finances, taxes, and economic and commercial advice. They are committed to supporting economic growth, improving services for Queenslanders, and ensuring safe, productive and fair workplaces.
The challenge
We were asked to help develop information architecture and user interface design for Nexus, a business system – including a 600-page intranet – that was migrated from Microsoft’s SharePoint 2010 and further developed as an enterprise content management system in SharePoint 2013.
The primary role of Breadcrumb Digital was to ensure a best-in-class user experience along with corporate brand re-development and conceptual graphic design to help ensure organisation-wide adoption of this core business system.
The skills
Successful uptake of the system was reflected by the importance of focusing design, development and testing efforts on user needs. These requirements were developed from user and stakeholder interviews, focus groups, observation testing and card sort usability testing.
The success of the project was also due in part to the overall quality assurance role adopted by Breadcrumb Digital. This role expanded beyond user experience and design consultation as Breadcrumb Digital undertook a number of technical reviews of the project HTML, CSS and JavaScript.
The finished product incorporated a range of innovative approaches to SharePoint functionality.
Jennifer Linde
Jake Waterer
Walter Leong
Kristen Willis
The approach
Championing the role of users and working closely with the Treasury project team – including their third party SharePoint partner – throughout the design and development process was essential for helping keep user experience as a key focus for the project.
Usability testing
Identifying user attitudes to the current system was done through a number of empirical user research techniques such as user and stakeholder interviews, focus groups, observation testing and card sorting.
Sharepoint innovation
Future development is supported by our creation of online, rather than static, style guides, allowing new developers to understand the complex issues like responsive design and interactive behaviour.
Quality assurance
A detailed review of the implementation ensured the accessibility, interfaces, and code met industry standards as well as user experience recommendations.
The outcome
Queensland Treasury was one of the first government departments to adopt SharePoint 2013. Innovative user experience solutions from this project – including the design and interfaces – are now being implemented by other government departments and statutory bodies. This legacy is a credit to our team’s expertise in both user experience design and front end development.
We still maintain the strong working relationship with Queensland Treasury, often providing consultancy and advice services for the new areas of the Nexus as the system continues to grow and develop.