Background
Background
Background
Okanagan College is a public post-secondary educational institution providing a wide range of academic, vocational, trades, apprenticeship, and continuing education programs and courses. Their website provides recruits, students, faculty, staff and their community with online applications, program information, scheduling and class material, as well as provides an event calendar, emergency alerts and controls digital signage.
Considering the offering behind their digital platform, Okanagan College’s development and front-end marketing team had their work cut out for them. With such great demands, their team felt frustrated with their inflexible tool that required extensive hours of IT time in order to align with business operations.
Understanding the need for digital transformation they looked for opportunities and innovation. With an experienced team on board, they agreed to redesign their site, building on a new platform in order to automate and integrate.
Independently designing a new architecture on a completely new CMS is a daunting task for many companies to take on. Okanagan College recognized exactly that which sparked the conversation with our team to assist with the architectural design, educational learnings and build of their new site.
Objective
Objective
Objective
What Okanagan College wanted to achieve from an Acro-based collaboration.
With a fully capable in-house development team, they required a third-party vendor that provided guidance and knowledge to assist and educate their team through the redesign of their site build.
They knew what their followers wanted from their online customizable shopping experience.
They understood their business objectives:
- To have a third party vendor educate & train their development and front-end marketing team on how to build, support and maintain their site independently.
- Discover the fundamentals of their new CMS and design an industry-leading digital architecture.
- Learn the benefits of the open-source community and how to utilize the contributions that are available to maintain and improve their site.
They knew they wanted:
- An effective solution to control digital signage, emergency alerts, real-time updates and event calendars.
- User-friendly administration workflows that restrict permissions and streamlines operations for both backend and frontend users.
- Support with creating a website wireframe and design that encompasses their brand and provides an industry-leading user experience.
- Consultation with their development team identifying what they will need to complete the build.
- A dedicated team to educate their development and front-end marketing team on the new CMS.
Solution
Solution
Solution
Support a capable team through the discovery and build of their open-source CMS solution using Acro’s Purpose Driven Development Method:
- Uncover and accommodate the needs of all stakeholders
- Review and support Public Affairs team throughout wireframing and design process
- Consult on best practices with using the Axure toolset
- Identify the purpose of individual software components: which modules would be used, which needed to be custom-built
- Recommend additional software components to be modified, replaced or maintained and connected
- Internal and External QA
- Weekly training and consultations for IT, UX and creative design.
Outcome
Outcome
Outcome
An effective flexible digital ecosystem that was created and now maintained by Okanagan College’s internal development team, supported by Acro Media’s development and UX training and consultation.
The Consult and Training allowed Okanagan College to:
- Create an optimized user flow and design for their new website that implemented user experience best practices.
- Implement a website with streamlined administrative management tools.
- Learn the robust Drupal ecosystem through training and supported development.
- Learn how to use Gitlab’s version control tool to manage and deploy code.
- Gain knowledge on server architecture and security best practices.