CREATIVE EXPLORER
Digital Library
Company: United States Postal Service
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Year: 2020
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Type: Design System
Infrastructure
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The purpose of this project was to create a library of assets, such as images, reusable code snippets, data definitions, etc. so that designers, developers and analysts would not have to recreate the same elements for every project.
01
Benefit
Increase efficiency and shorten turnaround time by making available a large resource of reusable assets that can be downloaded from the library and used as is or modified and reused as an additional asset.
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02
User Journal
In order to gauge the need and usefulness of this resource, a questionnaire was created to determine the perceived needs of the potential users, which included designers, business analysts, and developers.
03
The Interfaces
In order to accommodate the range of content, the library was divided into the following sections: a design assets repository, a code repository and a Wiki. All the material in the Design Assets site are searchable, indexable and updatable. Once an asset is uploaded to the site, SharePoint tracks versions and modifications.
04
Information Architecture
The listings pages needed to be dynamic so the new entries would appear as they are uploaded.
Uploading a file required the user to populate all necessary fields, such as filename, display title, text description, thumbnail image (if applicable), etc.
05
Wireframe
The initial phase of this project was to create a wireframe and a working prototype of a document gallery for PowerPoint presentations.
This was done with approximately 20 PowerPoint files, and it was used to test the practicality and usefulness of the ultimate product.
The next step was a set of high-fidelity mockups, followed by a functioning prototype written in HTML.
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06
Design
The second phase of this project was to create a document/image/multimedia gallery for presentations, photos, videos, logos, icons, etc.
All existing assets were catalogued, prioritized, and organized into folders on a local server. Thumbnails would need to be made of all visual assets, and a naming scheme would need to be devised so that all related assets could be accessed via a script. Descriptions and titles needed to be created for each asset, and all images, descriptions, titles and other attributes were need to be indexed and fully searchable.
07
User Testing
• Discover how the user searched and uploaded a file.
• Target audience was a director, developer, designer and data science.
• Task: find presentations in Artificial Intelligence, download logo, find medium size logo, upload a photo, search all documents and files related with broadband, find CSS file that is used in PPE dashboard, ...
08
User Guide
We created a user guide to help in using the system. Covering detailed information about functionalities and guiding users through how to use the product and get up to speed quickly.
