Highlands & Islands Enterprise Application

The Highlands & Islands Enterprise is a Scottish government sponsored agency offering support to businesses, communities and individuals through a network of Local Enterprise Companies. Frontend worked as a Progress Consultancy Services partner to develop their web based Customer Information Database.

Frontend worked with Progress Software professional services and HIE Teams to define the requirements for the Customer Information database application. Customer information was distributed over several applications and databases throughout the network of Local Enterprise Companies (LEC's) and proved difficult to manage and keep up to date. The new web based system is the first module of functionality providing access to all customer related information, it provides a single point of access to customer details, associated documents and customer enquiries and actions taken by the LEC's.

The Project

Initial user requirement interviews were conducted with the mangers of the LEC's who deal with customers on a daily basis, and would be responsible for following new and ongoing cases and queries from local businesses, individuals and communities. It became apparant through the user requirement interviews that the system could be used in a flexible way as data collection and entry could occur in a variety of different scenarios, employees may access the database to respond to queries over the phone or in person and these may be logged directly into the system or cross referenced at a later stage - an important factor in the success of the new application was to avoid duplication of data and ensure that all queries were logged appropriately and assigned to relevant employess for follow up.

The information architecture and interaction stages ensured the complex matrix of information was presented in a clear and user friendly manner. Basic customer information could have multiple contacts and locations aswell as a number of different enquiries and activities associated with them, it was important that this information be presented in a simple and yet accessible way without forcing users to engage in multiple queries to find it.

The final interace was built in XHTML 1.0 Strict, using CSS for all layout and presentation considerably reducing page load times. The main customer information screens uses expanding and contracting 'blocks' of information to reduce initial information overload, with a single click to expand all blocks and give easy access to an entire customer file if needed. This method of presentation was preferred over multiple screens, drilling for information or a 'Wizard Style' approach and considerably reduced time to task for the common activities performed by the LEC employees.

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