National Advisory Committee on Blood and Blood Products

About NAC

The National Advisory Committee on Blood and Blood Products (NAC) is an organization associated with the Canadian Blood Services. They are an interprovincial medical and technical advisory board, made up of voting and non-voting members that have been appointed by Provincial and Territorial Ministries of Health and Canadian Blood Services. NAC provides professional leadership in assisting, identifying, designing, and implementing cost-effective blood and blood product utilization management initiatives for the optimization of patient care throughout Canada. 

 

Project Overview

As part of a multi-year digital transformation initiative, Canadian Blood Services was updating and transforming many of its digital assets. The contract for this project covered the work that was required to develop the new website for NAC. The website was developed on the Drupal 9 platform and all configurations and settings were completed using the Canadian Blood Services standards and best practices.

 

Project Objectives

Ensuring that NAC’s new website was relaunched on a user-friendly content management system (CMS) was key. Along with providing NAC website administrators with an easier interface for content publishing and editing, ensuring that they could quickly make content updates and move on to other tasks was imperative:

1. Ensuring the site was more user-intuitive for non-NAC members to find content through clear navigation
2. Improved backend administration to make admin work easier for the NAC project coordinator
3. Create a French version of the site with all content translated 

 

Challenges

All Canadian

The biggest unique challenge for this project was that it was required that all data stays in Canada. With that being a requirement for the project, we could only have our Canadian developers on the project as well. This meant some rescheduling of resources by our Project Management teams to ensure that we kept everything developed within Canada.

 

Sophisticated Design

The second challenge we had was that there was no outline for the fidelity of the wireframes that we received from CBS. There were some that we received that were high-fidelity and others that were low-fidelity. This caused some issues when it came time to create the pages with the low-fidelity, as our developers had no guidance on what the styling of the elements was supposed to look like.

 

Solutions

Oh, Wireframes!

In order to ensure that the elements were styled correctly on the pages that we received low-fidelity for, our tech lead collaborated with our in-house UX designers to chat it out and come up with a plan. For the simpler components, we analyzed what had already been built, along with other components in the design,  and styled those elements as close to what we thought they would like as possible. For the more complicated components, we reached out to the NAC team to provide high-fidelity wireframes for those pages. This ensured that the budget remained in scope, without costly revisions.

 

Lessons Learned

One of the most important takeaways from this project is to lay down the expectations for the final fidelity for the wireframes before beginning on the front-end styling. This will save headaches and costly revisions in the future. 

 

Our Team loved working with the Canadian Blood Services and NAC teams on this project. It was an interesting project and we loved being able to build something so useful for their association.