Interactive platform for the Swiss Association of Master Builders

Ambition

The Swiss Association of Master Builders (Schweizerischer Baumeisterverband) is one of the largest associations in Switzerland and exists since 1897. It’s the nationwide occupational, economic and employer organisation for companies in the construction and civil engineering industry and related branches of the main construction trade. As in all sectors of the economy, the construction sector is also affected by digitalisation and therefore has the opportunity to boost its position with innovative solutions.

With the industry transformation program “Baumeister 5.0”, the SBV supports its members, the construction sector and the entire industry in the digital transformation. The “Baumeister 5.0” programme includes the three key activities “Digital Sensitization”, “Digital Empowerment” and “Digital Transformation. The goal of the SBV was therefore to create a platform or a HUB, which coordinates these three activities centralized. The first step in the expansion of the planned platform was to promote the activity “digital sensitization” by means of an “innovation feed” and thus to stimulate the exchange of information between all participants in the main construction industry.

In addition to the actual platform, the SBV also wanted to optimize the number of systems and tools used. Another requirement was that the platform should have a simple user interface for the editorial staff and allow an efficient connection to surrounding systems.

Taking into account Switzerland as a multilingual country, the innovation feed should also be available in German, French and Italian.

Action

User Story Workshop

First of all it was necessary to get an overview of the target groups and their needs. For this, Enigma’s own developed User Story Workshop has been used. Based on these target groups, user stories were described. Each of these stories reflect both a design and a technical requirement for the future website.

Experience Design

The CI/CD of the Swiss Society of Contractors already existed. However, as is usual on the web, this style guide, which was conceived from a print perspective, had to be translated into the web world. Enigma developed three concepts, so-called Visual Universes, which show different directions in web design while being inline with the general CI/CD guidelines.

Based on the selected visual universes, the individual web page design modules were created using an agile methodology. Each module was designed and implemented with the idea of flexible use on the website, both on the mobile and on the desktop computer.

Technical implementation

The Swiss Society of Contractors uses a variety of systems and tools. In addition, various stakeholders should actively manage the website. The biggest requirement, however, was to enable external authors to actively contribute articles to the innovation feed. In order to minimize the possible spam contributions, the possibility of registration was created. Every user of the website can initially create a contribution account to post articles and events. Using a complex review process, the article is only released when an editor reads and releases it. The user will then receive a confirmation mail that his article has been published.

The second focus of the site, providing information about the digitalisation within the construction sector, should be solved by implementing a powerful search functionality. This functionality should not only search articles and events, but also the glossary and the partner network. In order to output the search queries correctly and filter them according to relevance, Elastic Search was used, a search function that is perfectly adapted to the new server setup.

Impact

With the innovation feed of Baumeister 5.0, a website has been created which not only impresses with a user-friendly interface, but is also up to date from a technical perspective. The innovation feed was designed as a blueprint for all further web development within the association’s web universe. Thus costs can be saved and synergy effects can be used. Thanks to the chosen technology and the new server setup, the Society of Contractors once again takes a leading role in the field of digitalization.