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From:
William Hudson <[log in to unmask]>
Reply To:
Date:
Fri, 8 Mar 2002 20:35:40 -0000
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Posted on behalf of James Bull <[log in to unmask]>

All,

My original question was:

In our company we recently launched an Intranet publishing system which
allows people to create and manage their own sites. Templates provide
consistent high-level navigation and visual design for every site.
Individual site administrators create site structures with pages and
child pages. The "parent" page names appear in a left-hand side
navigation bar. In the content space,  site administrators can
essentially do what they like.

Site administrators are busy people with many other tasks to do and
usually no previous exposure to concepts such as "information
architecture" and "usability". They are doing all the predictable
things: not understanding the users needs, creating structures based
around organisation charts, creating long pages of text, unstructured
lists of links etc.

One of my roles as Information Architect is to promote user-centric web
design and its benefits to potentially hundreds of site administrators
(and their bosses). The challenge is how to make the subject "real" for
people who have other priorities. I've thought of doing a case study
with usability testing and site re-design to show the difference in
results.

Does anyone have any experience with a similar situation?
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I had five replies which I have reproduced below with a little editing.
In summary, the advice is as follows:
- offer an incentive (free consulting, showcase the improved sites -
response  #1)
- create a perception of involvement in the process ("help us figure it
out ..." response #3)
- create some excitement (response #1)
- produce objective results that cannot be disputed (responses #1 and
#3)
- training and education, practical not theory,  pitched at an
appropriate level, train key people (responses #2, #4 and #5)
- style guides and checklists for quick reference (response #4)

Thanks to everyone who responded.
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#1
One thing that worked particularly well for us was to recruit site
administrators for one of our Intranet sub-sites as volunteers for FREE
consulting by our usability team! We discussed user needs and high level
business requirements. We took an inventory of the content already
available on the existing site. We did a heuristic evaluation to
identify the low-hanging fruit. We worked through some user scenarios
with our site administrators.

The biggest challenge was initial buy-in from our volunteers. Even
though they wanted their site to be better they were quite attached to
it since it was their own creation. As a result, we had to conduct
usability tests on the original site to "prove" that it was difficult to
use. Once they saw the results, they were ready to proceed with the
dramatic changes necessary.

After the re-design, we conducted another round of usability testing,
made some final changes and then rolled out the new site. We gave a
presentation about Intranet usability featuring their site. All of the
other 100+ site administrators in the room were, as a result, extremely
excited about making their own sites easier to use. We had many ad hoc
requests for usability consulting, further resources and design general
Intranet guidelines.

One challenge we had was availability of information. Since our site
administrators did not have access (obviously) to other Intranet sites
in the industry, they had no one to benchmark against other than
internet sites at large. Research available on useit.com helped a bit.
However, we found that the NN/g report on Intranet design (which came
out after our work) would probably even have be en more helpful.

Sarah Ingalls
(company information deleted by request)
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#2
This can all be helped with a course in "writing for the web", for
example, Jutta Degener's mini-course: "What is good hypertext writing?"
(http://kbs.cs.tu-berlin.de/~jutta/ht/writing.html)

No need to explain IA theory, IMHO.

Peter Boersma, Consultant Information Ergonomics
<mailto:[log in to unmask]>
________________________________________________________________________
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#3
You might want to take a look at my Web site, www.bulcmale.com and thumb
through the "usability research" section.

Although we never got the chance to actually implement the proposed
redesigns, they were clearly the result of exhaustive research and
testing that produced *DRAMATIC* results and statistics. It was pretty
hard for either the Exec Staff or Engineering to argue with stats that
showed dismally low success rates for new users signing up. The other
thing that seemed to get a lot of buy-in was our approach when
presenting the final
results: we very carefully couched it in terms of, "Here's what we found
out about the current design, here's what we need to change and where we
want to go with the design --- now we're turning to you to help us
figure out how we can achieve that." It  worked wonderfully!

Best regards,
Matt Prather
BULCmale Enterprises
www.bulcmale.com
[log in to unmask]
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#4
We are implementing a content management system which will help some -
hopefully we'll be able to present a checklist to authors when they open
or save a web page. We are also writing an extensive style guide which
will be presented on an Intranet so authors can quickly search for
information when they don't know what to do e.g. "How should tables
look?". We'll also do some train-the-trainer exercises, training key
people in each location that act as a resource for others.

I hope this helps.
Regards

Michelle Archard
[log in to unmask]
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(5)
We have 250+ publishers using Teamsite and Dreamweaver to
create/maintain/publish thousands of stories. We are in the process of
switching to a new version of Teamsite, which entails every publisher
learning a few new/different steps in the publishing process. So, every
publisher MUST attend a mandatory Teamsite training session, otherwise
they won't be able to publish. We (the usability team) are seizing this
opportunity and will take approx 15 minutes of every training session to
present the basic principles of good web content. (Mind you, we're not
talking about usability testing, navigation structure etc -- just the
do's and dont's of good writing and page/content/link design a la Jakob
Neilsen and any of the other broadly recognized research.)

We will be showing good and bad examples and encouraging the publishers
to think of the users in their publishing efforts. We are providing a
simple/short leave-behind document as reference material and providing
an internal website with similar information.

We will (hopefully) ingrain in them that their pages and their
publishing efforts will be far more appreciated by the 10,000+ users
(whose time is a
premium) if their pages are well-crafted.

I think a case study is an excellent device for you -- especially in
convincing the "bosses" you mention -- particularly if it represents a
time savings on both the publisher side and the user side that can be
translated into a $$$ figure.

Malecek, Patrick [[log in to unmask]]
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Regards,
James
N. James Bull
Information Architect
Telstra Corporation
Intranet Management
61 2  9298 9959

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