My last piece of work for the Bank was to redesign its Corporate Intranet, and improving its IA (
Information Architecture). The business case which drove this project established 2 KPIs around
usability and
findability for the company's most popular channel which counts more than 15,000 pages and 40,000 users.
I first thought that it was a large project but the challenge was just exciting enough to take it on. I was confident I had enough experience in web design that I could consider it as a traditional exercise with established steps that I was already familiar with. Furthermore, I had guarantees from the executive level that there was a decent budget allocated.
We decided to engage an external agency called
Step Two design - see
clients list - to assist me through the project and we contracted a
senior consultant who would mentor me while I'd proceed in 4 steps:
- Content inventory and search reports analysis;
- Card sorting;
- IA testings (Card-based classification evaluation);
- and wireframe testings.
My role during these usability exercises was to organize, to facilitate and sometimes to conduct them. The hardest challenge I faced was to find a good representation of all users and to have a goo diversity of profiles. The results could only be as good as I could get a good breathe of the company. I needed people with different roles, business units, locations (Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane) and experience. I certainly spend a lot of time on this considering that I was working in such a big company but at the end I believe that our results now are accurate.
I was also in charge the analysis all along the project, and my objective was to develop a new design that would meet better user needs and improve the usability. We established a modular model that organizes all the content within a common structure. The Corporate content is organized in 1 giant site called the group site and is placed at the center of all the online information. It has a specific IA that assists users to find its immediate content (group wide content), and it has a design that links better to all the other resources available online. Then around the group site, there are as many micro-sites as there are business units and communities of practice. The fashion of the Intranet is actually similar to the universe with planets around the Sun.
Step Two published a post ad-hock to describe a bit more our analysis. I invite you to visit their findings at this
url.
