Overview

It’s for one of our clients based in the USA. A simple CMS-based system is used by multiple employees to manage their leaves and their timeline. Companies can manage their employees directly from this platform.

Client requirements

Many companies manage their employees themselves. It's hectic work. The same goes for employees. If one employee wants to apply for a leave, they have to manually apply for it. It’s a long process. One has to write an application and then go to the office and submit the application. Then HR would have to approve it. Our client was aware of that process. He wanted to make this whole process online and hassle-free timelines. He knew that it would save time on both sides. So, he came to us with this vision in his mind and presented it to us.

Discovery As a company, one would want to log their employees' timeline and maintain a record of their paid and unpaid leaves. That’s what drove our client to create their own CRM which would do that. They wanted the CMS to be fast, easy to maintain and look alike on all mobile screens. After our discovery meeting, we dove into some additional research to learn more about the patterns of consumers within their target audience. Also, we studied up on potential competitors within their target niche and conducted design inspiration research to get started.

Strategy Keeping their top goals in mind, we started to put together the structure for a CMS. Pulling from UX patterns we observed during our research phase, we designed it while keeping the possible user base in our mind. We wanted to keep all the processes as simple as possible. Domain and Application understanding during our discovery process drove us into the very important decisions that were made during UI Designs, Technology selections, and Architecture. The client does not have any Technology preference but some base guidelines for their future application, including some points like it should be fast and easy to maintain. Laravel which is the framework of PHP was presented to them by our manager and they agreed to it. MySQL was chosen by our backend team as the DB.

Build

We jumped into designing the main layout of the application with the close coordination of our client team, which led to the project setup and architecture design, Back end project was established on PHP and Laravel framework. While building the application's architecture, the core focus was to set up a project that followed the market standard and best coding practices. A sheet of coding practices was shared across the team who was working on the project and the best practices were ensured with peer code reviews and pull request approvals before it merged to the main repo. The project timeline was set up and scattered into weeks resulting in a build each week with a checklist of completed features to client QA teams after performing the initial testing on our end.

Test & Launch

All testing for the website went smoothly as we ensured everything was working properly and responding optimally for all devices. Once the website was launched, the client was extremely pleased with the outcome and was excited to finally be able to share the site with the world.