I often ask stakeholders to tell me their problems rather than solutions so that I can take a deep dive into what the real issue is. However, there are times when a stakeholder has an idea that is so clean-cut and simple to deliver that I’m disappointed we hadn’t thought of it ourselves.

In Nucleus, admins create projects, which gives them a framework to create forms and manage datasets within that project. The redesign moved project management from a pure list page to more visual content areas. The idea was to provide admins with easy-to-read high-level data that keeps them informed and makes the page more useful. In the past, once the award was created, there wasn’t much use for the page.

The result has been successful, but there was an unanticipated difficulty for admins who manage huge numbers of projects. Nucleus always presents a challenge: we have some clients who are light users running one or two awards a year, and others who are heavy users running multiple awards year-round. Designers naturally make things look great with manageable amounts of data, but one of my core tasks during any design implementation is to test how an empty page appears versus a full one.

During a stakeholder feedback session with the BAFTA Awards Team, our biggest client, one team member raised this as an issue. They explained that although they needed access to all projects, they mainly only worked on a few at a time. Was there a way to pin projects to the top of the page? In one sentence they’d not only explained the problem but also provided the answer that perfectly solved it.

In the next session with our lead developer, I asked about the difficulty of developing this feature. Super simple pinning UI is fairly standard and we already had users ready to embrace it. I tasked our designer with putting together different examples and refined these with the development team and stakeholders. Once I was happy with the final revisions, the front-end developer updated the CSS code. I then wrote tickets for the PHP developers to implement the development, which included ordering the pinned projects separately from the existing query. Once implemented and tested, we released it quickly and all in, around six weeks from conception to release.