Jonny Martyr
PICAMS
Properties-in-Care Asset Management System
Historic Environment Scotland stores thousands of items of data about the 300+ sites it manages, from visitor metrics and 3D scans to maintenance information dating back hundreds of years.
The PICAMS project digitised, collated and organised this information, allowing for significantly faster retrieval, improved operational efficiency and strategic decision making.
PICAMS is one of the best things to come out of HES in ten years.
– Director, Historic Environment Scotland
The Brief
Historic Environment Scotland is a large organisation with the purpose of preserving Scotland’s incredible monuments, castles and other historic sites. With over 330 properties to manage, organising maintenance can be challenging, and information is hard to keep track of.
I was brought into the organisation to help establish the Properties-in-Care Asset Management System (PICAMS). This groundbreaking internal product was designed to be a one-stop-shop for all information relating to HES’ historic sites, from location and boundary data to maintenance issues and repair work.
My initial engagement with the PICAMS team was to provide UX guidance and deliver a series of discovery workshops to uncover user needs. This then evolved into wireframing and prototyping work, including regular user testing, information architecture and, eventually, full-fidelity UI design.
The Process
The PICAMS team was small in size – two developers, a QA tester, Scrum master and project lead – but big in ambition. Our task was to create a centralised digital platform for key information on all of HES’ 330+ monuments – information that predominantly existed in paper format, if it was indeed written down at all.
I began by running discovery workshops and activities with HES works managers from across Scotland. From these I established the core goals of PICAMS and was able to provide clarity to a potentially messy product by retaining focus on the main user requirements. This early engagement with our users also helped to build empathy within the development team, and by the time we had finished we had a clear idea of the problems we needed to solve.
After establishing this overall strategy, I began prototyping out the core functionality. Working in agile sprints, I rapidly iterated through paper sketches to a high-fidelity interactive prototype in Figma. I established a design system (based on atomic design principles), allowing me to quickly put together new layouts in full fidelity and thereby provide clear direction for the development team as they started to establish the underlying technology.
As development ramped up I began user testing to ensure our designs remained on track. I also conducted a series of remote and in-person card-sorting workshops and surveys to establish our information architecture.
The team was required to pivot dramatically during the Covid-19 lockdown in early 2020. The entire HES estate had closed to tourists, but the process of reopening safely was a hugely complex task to manage. Our team was called in for a rapid 3-sprint effort to build a system to manage this process and track the various checks that needed to take place. Thanks to the modular nature of the design system, and our laser focus on user goals, we were able to re-use a lot of existing design and code, and quickly delivered an internal dashboard to HES stakeholders. This tool became fundamental to HES’ reopening in late 2020.
Challenges
As a small team with tight deadlines, we had to be practical about what we could achieve. It was often not possible to implement more complex design ideas, so instead I focussed on keeping the design system simple and consistent, thereby reducing the overhead on developers. Regular user testing and workshopping also helped to keep the strategy closely aligned with what would deliver user value, eliminating waste from developing unnecessary features.
The Outcome
The PICAMS product is undergoing continuous development. Feedback from within the organisation (both users and stakeholders) is overwhelmingly positive – even now, many years after leaving the project, they still have an active team continuing development with a UX designer at the helm. For me it has demonstrated the value of modern design and UX practices, even within more constrained development environments.
