SunGard’s OneSolution was a suite of applications envisioned to run an entire government at the County or City level. Everything a citizen or public servant could need would be part of it, from emergency-response dispatch, paying your utility bills, point-of-sale kiosks, managing city budgets, and dedicated mobile apps for various city employees. At its peak there were over 160 developers dedicated to the program and exactly one UX resource: me.
The project kicked off in 2008 utilizing Microsoft’s WPF and Silverlight technologies, before eventually also adding native app support and web apps. While I had worked on plenty of Style Guides prior to this, this was my first true multi-product Design System.
Client
SunGard Public Sector
Responsibilities
Visual Design, UX Design, Front-End Development (Desktop, Web, Native Mobile), Training, Documentation
Execution
WPF was new to the world in 2008, and only one developer out of the 160 had ever worked on a UI before. As such, I was not only designing the product (and by extension the design system), but also creating the reusable components, patterns in templates in XAML for the developers to pull from. I then created documentation around each control, as well as co-led a weekly front-end dev training to get the team up to speed on implementation.
In 2010 we began expanding the suite of products into dedicated mobile apps (Windows Phone 7, iOS and Android). Once again, none of the development team had experience with the domains, so I was learning & training as I designed, developed and documented them.
For the mobile apps, we decided to step away from the Windows Vista-style gloss and instead lean on the native OS styling with our general colors, fonts, etc.
We also experimented with a landscape app for the iPhone 2, but even with it being a significantly smaller size than current phones, it was awkward and clumsy to use in testing.
Microsoft Surface Demo
For an annual user group convention in 2010, myself and a dev converted the desktop Emergency Response application over to work on the original Microsoft Surface table. Mobile touch experiences were still fairly new without much in the way of best practices or design standards. This sort of large-format, multi-sided experience was unlike anything else available, sending us all the way back to paper prototyping in order to nail it.
Far from being fluffy vaporware, after the keynote by our CEO the Surface table was added to the show floor where attendees could interact with it freely.
Custom Icon Library
At the time quality, consistent icon sets were hard to come by so I decided to create my own for OneSolution. Five years later, the set had 500+ unique ribbon icons as well 100+ miscellaneous icons. Needless to say, I now prefer a solution like FontAwesome when starting new projects.
