Having worked with M&S on previous projects, it was our pleasure to accept the major undertaking of developing a brand new, critical piece of software to supersede their older system.
M&S Food Technical Centre required a system to support their operations and interactions with suppliers and auditors.
Connect has been a great success. It is software that is intuitive with clear codes of practice... and it affords us better management of our contact lists with clarity on when updates take place as emails go directly to suppliers.
— Claire Hughes, Head of Central Technology, M&S
The requirements
The web software needed to encompass multiple applications including:
A document library
A complex database of organisations and users
Form submissions and tasks management
Custom audit control processes
Nutritional benchmarking
Bespoke Excel and on screen reports
The solutions
The solutions we provided include:
We had a series of discovery workshops with the client to determine the key areas of the project and identify goals
We created a content strategy to define what new data structures should exist to allow for rich linking of content
We proposed a phased delivery of the website application based on priorities
We took the previous system's raw data and created several algorithms to transform the data into the new data structures
We iterated through some design prototypes to arrive at a consensus for the site templates and user journeys
The client partnered with us as we built the system functionality, testing the various components as they were delivered in order to validate their effectiveness in addressing each of the business cases
We demoed critical functionality early, and continually so we could make amendments as we progressed
The initial application was launched in January 2015 and continues to be extended as M&S's requirements evolve
Analysis
As we started to analyse the requirements, we realised that there were going to be a lot of different user journeys through the application. So the first step was to design a stripped back and minimal interface with plenty of opportunity for expansion, to give us a good basis for future flexibility.
Our designer Darren came up with an icon set which clearly defined each area. This helped to visually represent which part of the application the user was in and the necessary tasks that could be carried out.
Design
We created a set of "style tiles" which clearly defined how buttons, boxes and form elements should look. This meant that as the project grew the design could fit all aspects of the content of each section.
M&S were immediately taken with our design presentation so we set to work on coding the interface in a responsive way so that it was usable and beautiful on a variety of device displays such as tablets, mobile phones and laptops as well as desktop screens.
Launch
M&S Connect launched in January 2015 and continues to be actively developed by Pivale as new requirements arise.
The system as a whole has been met with praise from its users (auditors both internal and external to M&S, food technicians and supply organisations) and has led to other ideas from team leaders at M&S to add complementary new functionality to the initial build.
As we often like to say here at Pivale, harking back to "that famous M&S campaign": This is not just software. This is Pivale software!
