Working with Alqimi was one of the most enjoyable and exciting experiences I've had in recent memory.
The overall goal was to give one of Alqimi's primary applications, SIFT (Strategic Insight Fusion Toolkit), a complete facelift - including UX, development and everything in between.
Without a doubt, the most challenging part of this project was the sheer complexity surrounding the applications capabilities and also having to cater to an wide array of different users.
I firmly believe in the old addage measure once, cut twice and that's exactly what I did for this particular project.
For this project, I worked closely with the creative team to establish a flexible design system and also thoroughly thought through and executed the responsive front end development for the application.
Given the aforementioned complexity of this particular project, the discovery phase was quite immersive, intricate, and interesting (three i's!) to say the least.
I worked closely with the creative team to interview actual users and userstand what they thought were the pros and cons of the existing application and also discussed the specifics with the stakeholders to try to align the user goals with the overall business goals.
In addition, I also worked closely with the creative team to create user, process, and functionality flows to further ensure that all things were being considered before moving into the design phase.
For the development phase of the Alqimi SIFT project, the most pressing concern were time, scalability, and flexibility with regards to development environments and status updates.
With these challenges in mind, I decided that it was in our best interest to use Gulp for dependency management, SASS for the organization of the CSS files, and the Material for Bootstrap framework so that the offshore development team, myself, as well as the other onsite backend developers would all be on the same page and be able to move at a fairly rapid pace.
The development workflow went as follows:
1. Pull changes down from remote Bit Bucket environment.
2. Run npm install and gulp to start the local build.
3. Make the necessary front-end development changes.
4. Push the changes back up to the remote repository.
Being that both the offshore team and the onsite backend developers were unfamiliar with Gulp, I frequently conducted workshops and knowledge sharing sessions to assist them with this optimized workflow.
The Material for Bootstrap theme allowed us to iterate on their pre-established modular component library while also reducing the difficulty of optimizing the application for mobile devices.
All in all, the biggest takeaway from this project was how important communication and knowledge sharing are to a projects success.
By leading knowledge sharing sessions, providing detailed feedback for the other folks on the development team via commit messages, jira tickets, Skype conversations, and even in person, we were able to move fairly quickly thanks to the agile methodology and multiple iterations.
e. csbmedia@gmail.com / p. 301-769-1468
developer. designer. strategist.