themailer project > 3. the software > creating a nice environment to work

The purpose of the software is to allow small businessThe company has another software for enterprise business that works as a eCRM, sending e-mail campaigns, sms, survey and working as CMS, for companies like Lufthansa, Roche, McDonalds and more. to sign up for a service to create and send e-mail campaigns to their customers. It has an advanced Data Mining process for segmentation and database cleaning. Google analytics integrated reports and real-time reports, to measure the effectiveness of campaigns. Virtual Disk, data upload and import, html editor and widgets for real-time reports.

The web software is build as a web desktop, using MySQL, Php, Smarty, Ajax and the Yahoo! User Interface Library (YUI). The team involved is composed by me as a web designer, 3 php experts and 1 javascript expert.
My main tasks were to design and layout, edit the templates using XHTML and develop the CSS. I was also responsible for cross-browsers test, discover and solve css bugs and run usability tests.

There were challenges and lots of new things I´ve learn in this project:

  • There was no documentation of the project, so I had to do a lot of research to find the visual guidelines I would follow. I´ve based my choice of a blue palette of colors on the users and how much time they would spend working on it, for blue is pleasing to the eye even for frequent use.
  • Focus on the performance: optimized CSS code and fewer images as possible to improve the speed of the website.
  • Team work: how to share tasks to achieve a goal in common can lead to an improvement in the final result.
  • Leadership and how motivating a team is important for the innovation of the project.
  • Efforts on communication with the team and with the client can lead to fewer mistakes and less frustation.
  • Project management using SCRUM (agile methodology) and how to estimate tasks (time and scope), making me more aware of what I need to do to accomplish a task and my improvements.

As the software is under development and will be released only next September, I´ve made a movie to show a little bit of how it feels like to navigate the system:

watch the video presentation (no audio) see the screenshots (if video unavailable)