A New Focus

The SiteWand platform concept received a much broader scope and capability with the addition of a new idea, the dynamic content template, or DCT. The core building block of a SiteWand-based eCommerce application was called an 'engine', general purpose code that executes within the SiteWand runtime in response to a structured request (from a form, SOAP, etc). Each engine has named queries that can take parameterized input and return query data.

The DCT concept expanded this capability so that a response page could return data from the data table of any engine within the application, and output to various formats (HTML, XML, etc.) over various protocols (HTTP, SMTP, etc.). This defined new user interaction scenarios of greater complexity, and immediately brought one of our agreed personas into question: would the 'mom and pop' enterprise be able to use this?

This examination on the part of management led to a new direction in marketing and positioning: instead of selling the SiteWand platform for others to use, the Company would use the platform in-house to build customer systems. As a result, all the original personas were discarded in favor of a single new one: an Instantis Engineer.

The direct impact on the UI group was greatly reduced work in creating refined scenarios, help, etc., and an immediate workload creating interface designs and process for customer systems, chiefly in support of Six Sigma processes for healthcare-based firms (e.g., McKesson).

Conclusion

We had shown that the user interaction design process employed at Instantis, a hybrid of Waterfall and Agile methods, was orderly and produced results. Over a three-year period, the UI group was able to provide significant maturity and ease of use to the SiteWand platform.