My experience working on IIT Roorkee’s intranet portal
What is omniport?
Channeli is the IIT Roorkee’s intranet portal, which digitises the day to day tasks of students and faculty at the campus. Channeli has around 40 applications, a few of which are Placement Online, Noticeboard, LecTut, Registration Online, and Slambook.
Launched in 2013, it became difficult for the old portal to handle 9 lakh requests it was getting, and maintenance became challenging.
And hence Omniport was born, we upgraded the tech stack, made the portal mobile responsive, improved the user experience of the portal as well as all the applications.
We made omniport Open Source; any institute can easily set up, customise, extend, develop, or anyone can contribute to omniport.
Why I started this project?
There was a year-long difference between the completion of the design and starting the development, the stakeholders got changed, designs were handed over to the subsequent batch of students, and all this created a gap between the developers and the designs, which reflected in the final product.
I started on this project after it was beta developed. My task was to find out the problems in the portal and solve them before the final launch of the portal. This task was to be done in a short time of two weeks.
How we approached this
Due to the complexity of the situation, several stakeholders involved, and the strict deadline of two weeks, it was essential to make sure that we’re on the right path. For that, I organized a discussion session.
Project Meeting
- We did the meetup with everyone, including the developers, in which we discussed the beta developed portal intending to find out the exact problems.
- We also discussed the technical feasibility of solving the problems.
Insights and defining the scope
Insights from the meeting
We noted down all the ideas from the discussion and decided on a few of them to work.
Here is the list of the final problems that we decided to solve before the launch:
- The navigation in the mobile view was not intuitive.
- The admin side didn’t have some features and components.
- Some icons and components were not self-explanatory.
- Settings were not properly segmented.
- Some services like event calendar, forgot password, etc. were not designed.
- Some apps didn’t have logos and icons.
Working on the solutions
We were continuously discussing, trying, testing, and finally developing functionalities.
We organized a few more meetups to discuss possible solutions and finalise from them. By the end of the second week, we made the mobile view responsive, worked on the onboarding, designed new user login, signup, and reset password flows.
I also worked on email templates, web notifications, and implemented compulsory email verification.
The launch
After months of hard work, meetings, debates, and iterations, Omniport was launched for residents of the campus on 13 January, 2020.
What I learned
This project not only helped me sharpen my design skills, but it also helped a lot to learn management; I got to learn to conduct brainstorming sessions, work with a team of developers and stakeholders, defining the scope of a project and manage my tasks for a strict deadline.
This project shaped me as a better designer and a managed and organised person.
Thank you for reading :)
