The second speaker after lunch was Peter Grierson from SHIFT, who is a User Experience Specialist there. He’s previously worked for the ANZ Bank (on the Intranet design team), Sensis, and Information and Design (Australia). SHIFT started as a web/intranet design firm, but in recent years, have expanded into business and information architecture.

Agenda:
– Principles of Usability
– What makes a good intranet?
– User centered design
– How to conduct research within your organization
– Usability testing and validation

Principles of Usability
The official measures for usability, as defined by the ISO, include (a) efficiency, (b) effectiveness, and (c) satisfaction. We need to know who the users are, the tasks they are doing, and the context in which they are doing the tasks.

What Makes a Good Intranet?
– Can staff find what they’re looking for?
– Are things consistently placed on the Intranet where people can find them?
– There will be good feedback on the Intranet, eg, people are getting through their work faster, improved productivity
– Features of a “good intranet” … include effective search, Who’s Who, HR online.
– Intranets go through a variety of development points in their evolution: (1) the initiation stage (“try things out”), will need a sponsor to shift to the next stage; (2) contagion (“new things done”), but it needs a critical mass to get to the next level; (3) control, but will need more control to get to (4) integration. See Damsgaard and Scheepers (2000) for a graphical overview of this.

User Centered Design: Balancing Business and User Needs, Design and Functionality
User centered design (UCD) places the user at the center, not the “solution” being developed. Some of the questions that UCD tries to answer:
– What’s their experience with this kind of thing?
– What functions do the users need?
– What information, and in what form?
– What are the user’s tasks and goals?
– How do users think this thing should work?

Depending on time and budget available, will depend on how deep you go.

SHIFT seeks to combine UCD with good visual design. The foundation levels include user research and strategy, information architecture, visual design, digital branding, and content management systems and solutions. This is an iterative set of analysis points. For each stage of the redesign process, there is an iterative process: start with (a) discover, (b) do a design, (c) build it, and (d) test it (“often and early as you like”), and then start again with (a) discover, etc. Use what you learn in previous iterations to improve future processes.

Research Techniques for Achieving User Centered Design
Research techniques include:
– Interviews. Be careful that people might tell you what they should be doing, not what they really are doing. Also, if you take people outside of their environment, it can become very formal, and you miss out on a lot of the interruptions and environmental factors that should be taken into account.
– Discussions with stakeholders about goals and values.
– Review search logs, and in particular what searches failed.
– Use tools that show click trails that worked and those that didn’t. Fix the latter; don’t break the former.
– Key questions … (a) who are the intranet users?, (b) what are they trying to achieve?, (c) what other sites exemplify best practice for your users?, (d) what organizational goals should be supported?, and (e) what drivers prompted the project?

When mapping this out, there’s a discovery process to go through:
– Who are the key user groups?
– What tasks and goals do they want to achieve?
– What environment do they work in?
– What is their background?
– How do they perceive intranet content?
– What are the differences between the different stakeholder groups?

Information architecture is a set of techniques used to make information with a purpose findable to an audience who need or want that information. Information architecture includes navigation, site structures, links, search, titles, sitemaps, promotional features, icons, and more.

Card sorting is a great approach.

A traditional project with a firm like SHIFT would involve up to four stages:
1. investigation, 2 weeks
2. sitemap, 3 weeks
3. schematics technical, 3 weeks
4. present / sign-off — final presentation, content schedule, completed technical documentation (1 week)

Usability Testing
Aim: to validate that people can do the tasks that you established as being key tasks on the Intranet.
– Ask people to find things. Don’t tell them what to do; ask them to find things. Can they do what we set out to enable them to do?
– Test with target users. Test first with paper-based models, then on a working prototype, and finally on a fully working implementation.
– Measure through satisfaction surveys, feedback, usability testing, web logs, and comparisons to prior benchmarking on the previous Intranet. Do this on an ongoing basis: bench mark key tasks periodically, review search engine metadata for optimization.

In the Build phase, the design can be expressed through many design tools and solutions.

Looking for an External Consultancy
Look for:
– Case studies of successful sites
– A process
– User centered design
– Iterative design
– Communication between the organization and the consultancy
– … and an opportunity to meet the information architects and usability consultants (access to the staff, not just the front sales person)