Portal redevelopment for enhanced user experience and ongoing ease of implementation of new services
PRIMARY INDUSTRIES / AGRICULTURE
Landscape
When our customer, a leading government department, had realised a need to uplift their provision of online services, the Chamonix team was engaged to work with them to redevelop their Portal, which is essentially the gateway to a broad range of services across several important user groups.
With the portal serving as the main entry point to the organisation’s eBusiness environment, it provides the navigation and user experience that facilitate access to the digital services offered to all service consumers. The core application integrates fully with the agency’s identity and access management solution to provide a common shared identity allowed to enter the portal. The core functionality of the application is to facilitate the consumption and application for services via a digital platform.
With a larger number of subscribers using mobile device technology, usage of the portal was expected to intensify as more services were brought to a digital platform. During 2019 & 2020, Chamonix had partnered with the agency to uplift the user experience through the portal. This stage of the overall program of work included the design and development of a non-functional prototype outlining the proposed user experience, enhanced forms, and workflow functionality. The prototype for the portal applied to both desktop and mobile devices.
Subsequently, this project highlighted the need to make several changes to the way online services were provided via the portal.
Solution
During redevelopment, the organisation had determined several requirements that the Chamonix team needed to meet, including:
- Providing easily accessible information via a public portal
- Providing searchable and detailed information regarding licences and registrations to assist in customer decision making
- Streamlining the registration and workflow processes to provide customers with quicker access to services
- Providing customers with an enhanced user experience on both mobile and desktop devices.
In addition, the redesign highlighted shifting forms and workflow functionality from the current locations to within the portal. Identified as a means to reduce the cost and effort of implementing new services, this redesign would also lessen the risk of impacting existing services when changes were made.
One of the biggest challenges was to find the most appropriate solution to integrate a new Angular (Single Page Application) web application and its supporting API services into the existing identity management frameworks. Despite the challenge, we used an agile methodology and worked in partnership with the client to resolve the issue. This flexible approach allowed the implementation of new features for the final solution and the developers to adjust approaches as the project matured.
A team made up of Chamonix and the agency came together to work through the entire project lifecycle which helped ensure a smooth transition to the BAU team.
As a result, Chamonix successfully delivered the solution meeting all the client’s requirements as well as additional enhancements to the portal.
Business Benefits
Chamonix was able to deliver the scoped solution as promised, along with value added features, including:
A fully integrated service, moving away from a legacy application stack
Web application alerts and notifications which can be managed internally by the project support team
A self-service web portal with public facing API styled in-line with the client’s new branding and style guide, which was being refined in parallel with the project
Successful handover and operational readiness training of internal staff to the newer application frameworks
Assisted the client in the requirements and configuration of cloud services to manage the project through agile tools and cloud deployment CI/CD pipelines to automatically build, test and deploy the solution to develop, test and production environments.
The team delivered the project, including enhancements, under budget and on time, which resulted in cost savings to our client.
