brief Replace the current intranet’s portal with one that reflected the operational needs of restaurant managers.
After a long period of discovery and research, a wireframe began to take shape that reflected the very clear needs and desires of stakeholders. From that point, the portal was designed, along with a UI library and templates, using XML and Javascript for data transport and XSLT and CSS for rendering. It allowed us to create a very flexible page that could refresh and render new information without page reloads – a pressing concern since most external users were still on dialup.
I am especially proud of a few other things here. The floating iPhone-like icons predated the iPhone by a number of years (built entirely with divs!). The key operational indicators click through to robust data views. The display was built to promote the importance of key indicators, while allowing users to add additional indicators of choice to the front page.
The CSS architecture created a fluid layout that scaled to fit the multitude of screen resolutions targeted.
The portal also served as a system explorer, whereby any restaurant or franchisee viewpoint could be loaded at any time.
Over time, the needs of the company changed, and in 2007 I undertook research on a new design, one which ditched the candy-like artifacts of 2002 in favor of a more context-driven display of actionable items.
result This portal design was still in service through 2012, a testimony to its robustness and flexibility.
