Project Details
Searching and accessing technical data and information was a huge challenge for BP as there were large amount of unstructured information (100s of Terabytes) which were difficult to locate and access but whose content was of great value. As the company went through significant change it become an imperative that the knowledge base of the company was accessible and usable for competitive advantage.
Scope
To build a MVP for an intelligent search tool that would improve BP’s ability to find technical information stored inside BP (e.g. documents, reports, presentations etc.).
Challenges
From the visual point of view the biggest challenge faced in this project was how to display the huge amounts of information required without overwhelming the user. While going for a minimal approach would be desirable, during early research users emphasised that they wanted immediate access to as much information as possible, to avoid having to waste time going through countless results.
After information prioritization sessions with users and UX, a very clean and minimal palette was employed so not to provide excessive visual information. While BP's main color palette consists of 3 colors (2 shades of green and yellow) there was a conscious decision to discard 2 of those colors and only use their main green to cause the least amount of visual noise possible.
Final result
The MVP proved to be sucessful with the users tested for early adoption and the product was picked up for full scale production.
Developing a future roadmap
After BP decided to take the leap to full blown development, it became necessary to make sure that all the requirements captured and not picked up for the initial MVP stage were correctly documented and prioritised to make the transition for a different team smoother. With that in mind a roadmap was developed that aggregated all the "leftover" stories and mapped their execution in a period of a little over 6 months. The information required to develop this roadmap was collected through the workshop and user story cards described below.
User Story cards
In order to prioritise the user stories that would have more impact, a workshop was conducted where all the initial requirements were grouped into wider topics (eg, filters, data management, etc) and then ranked in terms of desirability, feasibility and visibility using some specially developed user story cards. The results obtained in this workshop were then put in an timeline by the project manager.