Platform
Web
Services
Websites
Industry
Non-Profit Institution
Team
4 Members
Time
5 months
About National Technical Honor Society
Founded in 1984, National Technical Honor Society is a non-profit institution with a mission to honor, recognize, and empower both students and teachers. The focus of this organization is career and technical education. The NHTS serves more than 100,000 active members throughout secondary and postsecondary chapters across the United States.
The Challenge
The NHTS needed a new web application to better connect with members. Their vision was to have an easy-to-navigate user interface that created a simple yet pleasant experience to users. The layout needed to be elegant, making it easy to locate all of the system’s features and seamlessly switch between actions. Most importantly, the system had to perform smoothly despite large amounts of data.
We want nothing but the best for our clients. When expectations are set, we strive to ensure we fulfill them.
Our Strategy
Following a series of initial meetings, we knew we had our work cut out for us with NHTS, in a good way. It was clear early on that active collaboration with the project stakeholders during the design stages would be key to fleshing out their vision and bringing the idea to life. Here’s how we did it:
Phase 1
Discovery
Our goal in the discovery for this system redesign was to first verify that all of the moving pieces were in the correct place.
- We spent a great deal of time learning what NHTS’s vision for the new system was, the challenges, opportunities, and how we could create the perfect platform.
Phase 2
Plan the User Journey
With a crystal-clear understanding of the NHTS’s vision, we started planning out what the user experience would look like.
- The focus of this user journey was simplicity – with a great deal of elegance.
- This involved creating a process that was overly streamlined where users could find exactly what they needed.
Phase 3
Wireframes
We created wireframes and started to illustrate what the app’s UI would look like.
- We provided a great taste of how the UX would feel, how the branding would shine, and everything that could be expected in the new web app.
Phase 4
Development
The next phase was to develop the workflows within the app.
- Following the Agile development process, we started to turn the nuts and bolts of the vision into a reality.
- Our front-end developers built out the client-facing aspects of the application.
- The backend was created to ensure the interaction between the user and the server was a streamlined as possible.
Phase 5
Test, Test, and Optimize
We wanted to make sure the usability of the new interface was crisp and easy every step of the way.
- This involved a great deal of testing, optimizing, testing, and optimizing some more to ensure EVERYTHING was flawless.
- Once NHTS was happy with the project, we began the steps to rolling it out.
Phase 1
Discovery
Our goal in the discovery for this system redesign was to first verify that all of the moving pieces were in the correct place.
- We spent a great deal of time learning what NHTS’s vision for the new system was, the challenges, opportunities, and how we could create the perfect platform.
Phase 2
Plan the User Journey
With a crystal-clear understanding of the NHTS’s vision, we started planning out what the user experience would look like.
- The focus of this user journey was simplicity – with a great deal of elegance.
- This involved creating a process that was overly streamlined where users could find exactly what they needed.
Phase 3
Wireframes
We created wireframes and started to illustrate what the app’s UI would look like.
- We provided a great taste of how the UX would feel, how the branding would shine, and everything that could be expected in the new web app.
Phase 4
Development
The next phase was to develop the workflows within the app.
- Following the Agile development process, we started to turn the nuts and bolts of the vision into a reality.
- Our front-end developers built out the client-facing aspects of the application.
- The backend was created to ensure the interaction between the user and the server was a streamlined as possible.
Phase 5
Test, Test, and Optimize
We wanted to make sure the usability of the new interface was crisp and easy every step of the way.
- This involved a great deal of testing, optimizing, testing, and optimizing some more to ensure EVERYTHING was flawless.
- Once NHTS was happy with the project, we began the steps to rolling it out.
The Solution
We provided a sleek user interface focused primarily on performance. We used AngularJS to create a single-page application that had sharp navigation and swift page load speeds. We served the data over a REST API via NodeJS on the backend, which integrated with PostgreSQL as our database. The result was a system with a complete suite of features and interactive components.
