Here at Collavate, we believe in “eating your own dog food,” or using your own products in day to day workflows. It seems logical to use workflow management and collaboration software to help us keep our remote teams and projects straight, but this is not always common practice. In UX Design, we’re told: “you are not the user” over and over and over again. This is true in many cases, but in the case of Collavate, I am a user, and I have opinions.
Today I’m here to talk to you about how we here at Collavate use, well, Collavate to create, edit, approve, and publish documents. More specifically, we’re going to share our workflow while creating the COVID-19 information and documentation published to our websites last week.
It all starts with an idea. Every feature, or enhancement, or improvement to our system has started with an idea. Internal ideas are all posted to a Collavate group titled simply: “Ideas.” There, we chat about the feasibility, what form it may take, and any barriers to implementation or creation. From there, we create the appropriate documentation. In this case, there were a few things created; one was an initial draft of Collavate’s Coronavirus Response, the second was a development document detailing where the link should be shown on our website, and within Collavate itself.
Details in hand, Matt started working on our letter to our clients, and I put together a document for the development and implementation of the links and banners. Matt submitted his document for all of our management to review when it was complete. After a few rounds of edits and discussions on wording, ideas presented, and overall content, it was approved. During this time, our development team was creating the code to handle the published links and to surface this information to our clients.
After the documents were reviewed and approved, Matt sent the new version to our international associates for translation into other languages. These documents were then submitted alongside one another for a final review and approval from our CEO and management staff. The development team implemented the buttons and the banners, and were waiting for the dedicated links for our documents.
When our CEO approved the documents, they were automatically published to dedicated URL’s for each document. These links were added to our website and application to ensure our clients had the most up to date information on how our company is handling the COVID-19 crisis. We believed it was important to share our plan about moving forward during trying times and to assuage any concerns of whether our uptime may be impacted by the current situation.
This flow is generally held for all of our projects at Collavate. From development to marketing, all of our documents are reviewed and approved by a group of peers and management before being released. Our goal with such recursion and oversight is to deliver outstanding user experience and uninterrupted service to all of our clients, past, present, and future.