We're in the really exciting stages of re-developing the museum's information architecture at present. I haven't written much about it until now just because I've been so busy organising all of the testing sessions and co-ordinating the volunteers and full-time staff who are helping out with the project, but here's a little background. I'm hoping I can share some useful information about our research process when things are a little quieter.
The background
Our website has evolved over the many years it has existed - in the early days, staff would come to the web developer's desk, dump a large stack of paper in front of him, and then ask if he could "put these on the internet, please".
The stacks of paper tend to be emails and PDFs these days, and the website has moved from a pure HTML and CSS implementation to a nifty open-source CMS. The stacks of information just keep on coming, though, and over the last 10-15 years sections and categories have been tacked on as needed.
So, early last year as part of my web training and documentation work I began to educate museum staff about the basics of usability and IA in a series of lectures and training sessions. This grew into the Web Advocates group, comprised of about 15 staff members across different parts of the organisation, who meet regularly to learn new technologies and keep communications open between IT and the rest of the company.
What's next
We're about to begin the user testing stage, which I will be leading, though some of the Web Advocates group will sit in on the sessions so they can get a better idea of how 'real' visitors use the museum's website. I'm really looking forward to it as this will be my first opportunity to test out the Silverback software, which we won a free license for at the last Edge of the Web conference courtesy of Matt Balara (thanks, Matt!)
Once those finish, then the team will move to building new navigation prototypes based on my analysis of the results of the testing sessions. Then, we start testing the prototypes. Most likely we will be using Balsamiq for this part.
The process has gone smoothly so far so hopefully we'll get some great results from the testing. Thanks to all those who will be participating in the sessions. I'm going to have fun running Silverback - I'm a PC (and Linux) user, and while I know my way around the command line on a modern Mac thanks to my Linux experience, the GUI itself makes me twitchy. So this should be interesting.
Comments