THE ENGINE OF DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION 

THE SOLVABLE PROBLEM

To deliver cloud-suite solutions which incorporate complex functionality from multiple products (built on legacy architectures) in a single interface, we knew our development teams had key challenges in front of them:

"Deploying a multi-tenant website in the cloud that includes services from multiple disparate systems within a single interface is complex. Developers are frustrated by the time, cost, and energy spent building the skillsets needed to deliver for their clients."

Our solution was to equip product teams with a framework which enabled them to efficiently focus on the area's they were most knowledge in and support them with toolsets and services for those area's they were least skilled in.  

PAIN POINTS

Industry product teams within Infor historically has faced key challenges when it came to modernizing the usability of their applications and enabling customers to surface up their data in a portal experience. 

1. Existing Infor Enterprise Resource Planning solutions are built on legacy tech stacks which can't support modern web controls

2. System of record applications weren't designed to host portal experiences for end-users.

3. Engineering isn't specialized in front-end development which is mass-market facing; UI controls take longer to build than usual

4. Development is reinventing the wheel for every industry cloud-suite when it comes to content management and publishing

There were several big opportunities to provide a robust platform for product teams which both enabled them to surface data, workflows, and business logic from multiple legacy applications and render them in modern, responsive web experiences.  As well we could save thousands of development man days for product teams by: supporting content and asset management capabilities , and delivering a robust UI kit with standard modern web controls, which could be shared across industry product teams.  

USER EXPERIENCE

UNIVERSAL UI-KIT

When initially scoping the platform, we spoke to developers who would be building on top of the infrastructure to better understand what their strengths and weakness were.  A general lack of front-end skill sets were stood out in our initial interviews and we quickly realized to help facilitate speedy development for our internal teams we'd need to provide some tools for them to leverage.  As such we built out a robust styleguide and UI-kit which would be available out-of-the-box to platform users to leverage.  As apart of the kit standard styling, markup, and animated controls were made available so developers building widgets could quickly copy and paste pre-built controls to act as a foundation.  

WIDGET FRAMEWORK 

Many of the solutions industry teams needed to deliver comprised of multiple components as a product suite.  To enable product teams to leverage functionality across Infor's product catalog we designed a widget framework, which leverages RESTful services rendering information from disparate applications in a single interface.  We also provided an SDK so mutiple product teams could build isolated widgets that could communicate with other product team widgets allowing for 

PLATFORM

Among the most critical deliverables to development teams and clients was a robust enough website development platform which could deliver standardized content and asset management capabilities across vertical industry development teams.  I did extensive research on other solutions in the market isolating some of the essential elements of their experience which drove improved usability (e.g.,  drag and drop website building, WYSIWYG content management, live editing, etc).  We didn't want to build a fully featured CMS, but we did need to surface enough critical functionality that creators were able to effectively generate content around their industry specific data.   

building it

From that research I documented nearly 190 functional and non-functional requirements the end solution would need to cover.  As well I mapped out the different user roles and the type of access they'd need. These were the foundation we'd use to map out the initial reference architecture and first low fidelity wireframes.

Partnering with a Sr. UX designers we mapped out the user flow for each user type and identified key screens; producing low fidelity wireframes which expressed the information hierarchy and functional/behavioral expectations 

Wireframes were the conversation tool used to visualize for development and UI designers the experiences the final solution sought to serve.  From here, I partnered with a team of 8 developers and 2 UI designers working in 4 week spring cycles to develop a functional proof-of-concept which would ultimately be used to inform the final solution which we have since brought to market late last year.  

Content & asset management [key screens]

SITE AND PAGE BUILDERS [key screens]

CONCLUSION

Today the Rhythm Platform serves nearly 100 product developers across 2 vertical industry cloudsuite solutions (B2B Commerce and Public Sector).  More than 90 unique widgets have been built for more than a dozen disparate component systems which today serve the 9 customers which have already signed onto the cloudsuites since its launch in November 2016.  The platform is still in its early development stage but offers Infor unique potential to design and develop whole new industry vertical cloudsuite solutions.