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Knowledge Management System (KMS)
Portland, OR - 2012
How you know when you know what you know
Known as Providence Health Plan's Oregon based Knowledge Management System (KMS), this web application was the end product of a relatively short design and development initiative aimed at reversing an organization-wide tendency for information chaos with a highly functional and efficient list-driven Intranet site for health plan knowledge that staff could easily navigate and update.
The product provided quick access to a myriad of interrelated Topics, Pends and Products through a dozen of tightly integrated layout and search pages originating from many lists, libraries and term stores that made content management a snap for non-technical personnel. It featured an easy to use menu-driven user interface that simplified navigation and revealed only what's relevant to a select combination of choices.
By eliminating the significant burden of time and effort required to input, maintain and find relevant Health Plan knowledge, the product kept all providers on story across all parts of the organization and led to measurable improvements in claim turnaround time, call metrics and positive customer experiences.
My role
Designer and developer working alongside a Product Manager and Solutions Architect, building the product from end to end over a six month period in only 200 development hours using out-of-the-box parts and client side code.
Content from 100+ SharePoint 2010 lists and libraries surfaces on about 14 pages through a single web part that refers to an HTM document fed by a handful of Javascript, jQuery, and CSS libraries and files stored on the site.
Inside of Providence Health Plan’s Intranet lives a web app devoted to sorting the heaps of tribal knowledge piling around the numerous plan providers and subject matter experts that support the Health Plan.
"One of two ‘Snapshot” pages (shown above) make up the heart of the user experience. A single web part on these pages pulls together all related content from a multitude of lists and libraries around a specific combination of user input."
Other Web Products
(1) Influential URL
Page looks at cookies or the URL string to populate content. Users are encouraged to copy and share a specific page through the URL.
(2) Triple Menu Navigation
Three menus auto-fill from three SharePoint lists. Specific combinations of menu selections determine page content:
Pends Menu – an input box with type-ahead feature which presents a drop list of five character Pend number selections that change with and highlight each character as it's typed.
Topics Menu – an on-hover drop list of Topic title selections organized alphabetically from A to Z.
Products Menu – a static menu of specific Product titles.
(3) Dynamic Title
Page titles display the combination of menu items selected along with their related owner and last reviewed information.
(4) Element Panes
Several panes of list content with hot titles that link to display forms and return user to the page of origin on close. The heading of each pane links to the list/library of origin and shows pre-filtered results using current menu selections.
(5) Table of Contents
A list menu highlighting the current page that is used for navigating through the 14 or so Topic and Pend content pages.
(6) Definitions Tooltip
An on-hover activated fade-in and slide down tool tip used for dictionary type definitions of PHP terms.
(9) Scoped Search
A direct connection to a search results page that crawls only KMS system content.
(7) Content Expand/Collapse
Clickable heading bars expand/collapse, highlight, and persist by cookies to keep content compact on page and display rich text content where needed.
(8) Help Rotator
A hidden Yes/No branching help dialog on the Pends Snapshot page is revealed when a SharePoint list is found with the same name as the Pends Resolution. Choosing a help selection along any branch expands and highlights the associated Pend Resolution below the help rotator.
(10) Tabs
On the home page, a tab interface provides a more traditional way to access content. Tab names can be added or removed through a list on the site, and each tab provides a zone framework for the arrangement of a variety of web parts.
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Under the hood
Strategies
• Maximize the use of OOB
• Think of design in terms of longer-term support and site evolution
• Model on Pilot / Build on Production
Power User role
• Search scopes
• Term Store
• 2 site templates
• 60+ lists and libraries
• 35+ custom Photoshop and Inkscape graphics
Developer role
• SharePoint Designer
• 3 page-layout templates (tabs, columns, search)
• 14 code-behind web pages
• 5 script libraries - jQuery, jQuery Tools, SPServices
• 2 custom Javascript files w/ 3000+ lines
• 3 custom CSS files w/ 700 lines
