The General Services Administration (GSA) is a U.S. government agency with the purpose of helping to manage and support basic functions of federal agencies.
The GSA’s Automated Advanced Acquisition Program is designed to connect commercial real estate holders who would like to lease space to federal agencies with federal managers responsible for finding space to lease. AAAP hired LookThink to redesign and optimize the user experience within the context of a migration to a new Salesforce platform, Force.com.
CASE STUDY
GSA: Dramatically Simplifying Federal Form Function
About the Client
AT A GLANCE
From cumbersome and non-intuitive to superior usability.
The GSA’s Program was created to connect commercial real estate holders who would like to lease space to federal agencies. Existing web pages supporting the exchange were extremely cumbersome and non-intuitive, which required the process for the real estate holder to complete a linear series of dense forms requiring a lot of detailed information – without the ability to save or manage input.
The results was a portal that provides both sets of stakeholders with superior usability within a polished interface that reinforces GSA’s image as a technologically savvy agency.
Project Overview
Primary Goal
To streamline GSA’s online marketplace
Audience / Users
Federal Employees and Real Estate Professionals
Related Technologies
Apex, VisualForce, Salesforce, Force.com
THE CHALLENGE
The GSA’s Automated Advanced Acquisition Program is designed to connect commercial real estate holders who would like to lease space to federal agencies with federal managers responsible for finding space to lease. AAAP hired LookThink to redesign and optimize the user experience within the context of a migration to a new Salesforce platform, Force.com.
OUR APPROACH
Avoiding Overwhelming, Massive Forms
LookThink inventoried and analyzed the existing forms in order to design a better user experience. This analysis served as the basis for determining how to avoid overwhelming users with massive forms. The team then developed a series of wireframes that incorporated many elegant means of managing the large numbers of required data fields.
Refining and Styling the User Experience
LookThink then delivered GSA a clickable prototype – enabling them to work collaboratively with GSA stakeholders and the development team to further refine the user experience. Perhaps most importantly, because users had a unique set of credentials, LookThink created a way for users to easily start and stop, saving their progress.
LookThink’s work also included portal look and feel – styling the experience to be on par with common commercial real estate platforms. Requiring backwards compatibility with Internet Explorer 7 and above, the team created the necessary visual assets, HTML and CSS and then worked closely with the development team as they integrated LookThink’s code into the platform.
The Results
The resulting portal provides both sets of stakeholders with superior usability within a polished interface that reinforces GSA’s image as a technologically savvy agency. Feedback from the commercial real estate community has been very positive, the number of users of the system has increased, and the form failure rate has dropped.
