CP Web Portal

Background

During the pandemic, when much of the world was working remotely, many business processes were challenged and needed to change quickly to adapt to sudden quarantine rules. The Capital Projects (CP) service line at the City of Houston was no different. CP had constantly relied on traditional methods in the workplace such as printing, scanning, and filing documents in folders and boxes. Many employees would dig through their inboxes to locate important documents and PDFs. However, the rapid changes as the pandemic progressed forced the service line to adapt to cloud-based solutions to maintain workflow, and while these solutions were effective, business groups struggled to adapt. CP needed a sustainable space for a growing number of applications, documents, and resources easily accessible to employees. A quick solution was put together, but lacked in terms of sustainability as the organization’s goals shifted. In response, our team took advantage of Microsoft SharePoint and created a centralized, user-friendly one-stop platform where employees could find all CP news, information, applications, documents, reports, and resources.

Challenge

When this project was presented to me, a web application was already developed in PowerApps to quickly meet urgent needs. To address the existing gaps within the application while redesigning, we identified two goals:

1. Sustainability: How can we make the growing number of applications, documents, and other resources between each business group and delivery line easily accessible for employees?
2. Retention: How can we make this website appealing to employees to keep using instead of turning back to email threads and multiple locally saved documents?

We also observed several changes that needed to be made to align the web app with the business needs:

• Bigger space for CP news items. The previous design could not fit at least 180 characters.
• Better space utilization for efficiency.
• Documents and reports needed to be built out to host material from multiple business groups and delivery lines.
• Training videos needed to be added to the web app.
  ‍

‍

A new and improved Web Portal

The CP Web Portal was redesigned with several new features to enhance efficiency and intuitiveness. The previous homepage was functional and effective, so we kept the core elements of the homepage and created another page for the newsletter section. This gave the news carousel more room which allows for more text and demands the users attention. While the app gallery remained unchanged function-wise, we had more room to allow longer descriptions and tags to help users identify apps and its uses. To encourage efficient use of each feature, we made a search bar that users can use to find apps as well as documents, reports, and other resources.

Resources has four subpages to help minimize the overwhelming amount of material the user might come across while attempting to find a document. Users can access general Capital Projects under "CP General Docs", delivery line specific documents in "CP Delivery Line Docs", video trainings, and reports all in their own subpages.

And lastly, we consolidated some features we determined were repetitive. We found that having different links for new requests, feedback, and contacting our team was quite redundant. To create a more cohesive experience, we added a Help Center to the footer where users could contact us for issues, give us feedback and ratings, and access user guides. We also created a page for bookmarks to allow users to bookmark apps, documents, reports, and any other materials they might access frequently. The separate Bookmarks page gives users the ability to quickly access their frequently used materials without having to navigate to each page.

‍

Feedback

Y’all have totally blown my mind. Point blank in my 25 years in this business; I have never seen anything like the Web Portal that is so intuitive, user friendly, and all around great design. Y’all should be proud of what you have accomplished as a group. Thank you!

‍Michael Ereti
‍Director of HPW Capital Projects

‍