Mental Notes:

Nextance provides enterprise software for managing contracts, commitments, and related business processes to Global 2000 companies and public organizations. They are a classic Silicon Valley startup. Nextance is also a classic example of the Product Realization Process as we were involved long before there was a shipping product, and — while it is true that the User Interface Functional Specification and HTML Wireframes were our most salient deliverables — the journey to discover the interface and its other byproducts was just as important.

Information Architecture:

One of the first steps in creating any interface is defining the Information Architecture. In dynamic application such as this the Information Architecture is quite fluid. Our first task was to collect the workflows from as many potential users as possible in order to abstract out the state changes and actions that the workflow engine would need to support. We did this in detailed Visio diagrams as depicted below.

These Visio diagrams, together with the early interface prototypes, drove much of the engineering object development during this phase of the software design.

We also developed a spreadsheet that represented these flows and that tied directly to the developing API of the workflow engine. This spreadsheet format became the first tool used by Nextance Professional Services to capture the flow of a new customer.

Interaction Design:

As data moves through these workflows, various users interact with both structured and unstructured versions of the data, and the data needs to be presented in different ways to these different users. For example, as shown in the screen to the left, early in the process the data often takes the form of structured data as an Administrative Assistant or a Paralegal enters several pieces of required background data.

 

Then, towards the end of the process, an unstructured view of the data is often needed. as shown in the screenshot below —  need to see the data as it might appear in the final document. As these different views of the data move through the workflow, the status and possible actions need to be consistently shown. Therefore, this information is maintained in the top section that is seen on the screens for both structured and unstructured views.

As alluded to above, lawyers are often an eventual user. This user type is accustomed to editing unstructured data in a Word Perfect-like environment. So, in those early days of DHTML, we took advantage of the emerging capabilities and did a fast prototype of what it would be like to offer an HTML-only version of a WYSIWYG editing and tracking interface. The prototype is reproduced below. Please try it: you can select text then drag it or act on it using the action buttons. (Note: In-line editing works in IE 5 and above only.)