\section{User Experience evolution}

The integration of collaborative environments goes beyond functional aspects.
Offering the population an unified experience across these environments has
been the key to encourage the use of the platform as it reduces the perception
of the complexity.

Thus, the portal information architecture was redesigned to provide a
transparent navigation and to reach users with different profiles.  A process
of harmonization has been employed on the interaction models of each tool in
order to reduce the learning curve.  At the same time, a new visual style was
created to unify the navigation experience and to comply with the guidelines of
the digital communication identity pattern established by the Federal
Government.

With the increase of the system features and the addition of new tools, the
visual style has steadily evolved in order to keep the navigation unified.
Moreover, tools from different backgrounds, which in many cases run
functionalities with similar concepts, made us face the challenge of developing
a transparent interface that unifies various context.  For each required
feature, we often have to conciliate data with distinct structure and
information pattern from each used tool. The interface was the meeting point
for this data with links that users will not notice.  The most common features
(i.e. search, display and edition of profile information and content) have been
brought in line with the structure and other existing features of the portal.

The other challenge is related to responsive web design.  The portal interface
and each of its pages were designed following the bounds of responsiveness
provided or supported by each tools.  In particular, in the case of Noosfero,
which do not have any official branch dedicated to improve its responsiveness,
our project needed to engage with the expansion of this platform, where we made
a lot of contributions and dialogues with the community and maintainers.  All
the project members got involved in the study, design and development of the
Noosfero's new interface which support a responsive web design and that have
not yet been completed.

Users are part of the process.  In 2014, a survey among users of the existing
platform was conducted to identify usability problems and to measure their
satisfaction with the system.  After the release of the new SPB platform,
several validations activities were implemented in 2015 and 2016, and the data
collected during this phase helped to channel our efforts to identify and to
improve the main fields of the new system.  The aim was to bring the users
closer to features that they have more interest and designing a navigation
which deepens in accordance with the user's depth of knowledge.
