Drupal Standard
Thinking and creating a Drupal Standard for Corporate businesses
The Problem
The core business of Digital Garden is developing corporate websites for businesses. Most of those businesses require the same product; a website that displays their business and products. Instead of reusing elements they had to develop each element over again for each client.
The Solution
The company wanted to decrease time on a project and decrease work on a website. Focus is to deliver the better solutions for each element, giving the user the best experience. Crafting a content driven Drupal Standard that includes all neccessary elements for business websites.
Similarities between Clients
I started to search for similarities between the corporate clients between the sites and users. For the similarities on the site part, these similarities are the elements that are often used and will be included in the Drupal Standard. Not only the websites have a lot in common, also the users are similar. Because the company develops a lot sites for Corporate, Education and Government organizations, the same kind of users are visiting those websites. The Drupal Standard should be viewed as the most used standard to evolve further from for each client.
User Centered Design
The Drupal Standard is meant to be used by several user groups. Each group has their own goal of use of the Drupal Standard. This creates several paths for each group of users. It gave me insight in the different paths by translating these paths into user journeys. With these journeys I was able to overview the different scenarios of the users.
Content First Approach
The corporate sites that will use the Drupal Standard will be content driven with multiple layers of content. The Drupal Standard had to contain all kind of information. In order to cover the whole range I have set up the different content types that may appear on a corporate website.
High fidility Prototyping
With the information of the user journeys and the content types I went making a high fidility prototype, covering all content types and pages. The prototype is clickable and demonstrates all possible variations for corporate sites. Discussing the prototype with the companies employees I could alter the result so it fits all clients.
Designing the Interface
Design is not only making it look nice, but it is also about usability, accessibility and user experience. The Drupal Standard is a product of the company and because of that I gave the product the look and feel of the company. By using the company's colors and design style it blends in with the current philosophy of the company.
The 'who we are' page includes on the left side the main content and on the right side the secondary menu listing all 'about' pages with content.
The 'news & media' page includes a two column overview of all news and media items. The pages is provided with item navigation menu in order to view more content.
The 'project' page includes a visual header with slide option. On the left the main content is being displayed and on the right secondary content about the page.