Introduction

Kirby International Building systems, a 100% owned subsidiary of Alghanim Industries, is the 7th largest manufacturer of PEB systems in the world. Kirby's discerning customers worldwide need value added services through the website that can serve as a fitting starting point for conducting their business with Kirby.

The Challenge

• To build a site architecture that was scalable, mult-site driven, and secure in administration
• To design a user-interface that is intuitive, user-friendly, and attractive to new and existing customers
• To provide significant value on the website through the provision of unique content, interactive forms and applications that engage the visitor.
• To provide Kirby's management staff with a solid, user-based content management system that would easily scale with their worldwide operations.

The Design Stage

Once sufficient analysis and information gathering has was conducted, we moved into a stage of active design.

The usual process was to use personas (user profiles), scenarios and specified requirements to conduct one or more participatory design workshops. This is the opportunity to get buy-in from various business stakeholders, to elicit specific user input, and to get initial design ideas.

Reviewing the requirements enabled us to identify the total amount of content required. The Content Cards Extract' document showed some of the content needed to engage with Kirby's customers. We printed this on cards and sorted the information into groups in order to come up with a structure for the new site. We held several informal design sessions. We made a decision to maintain, where practical, the same simple navigational structure, but to break it down into smaller and more modular elements - this would improve the user experience and make the site easier to maintain.

The Technical Implementation

Once clearly defined template structures and content areas were in place, Mawaqaa's team of highly experienced developers and testers integrated the design elements into the content management system architecture based on business rules and analysis from the first phase of evaluation.

Integration of all content was done through a content implementation and approval schedule with Kirby , that lasted around 1 month. Once the content implemenation phase was complete, Mawaqaa integrated its business modules such as the newsletter system, FAQ knowledgebase, Central forms management system and e-marketing tools for analytics and search promotion.

Conclusion

We retained the original vision for the site, while improving its operation and appearance, and meeting most of Kirby's original goals. Further usability testing and contingency design mechanisms are constantly being put in place to validate the changes made.

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