Hi,
thanks a lot to both of you for your (long!) replies.
Bryan:
> We found when we described processes rather than technologies
> or application-sets, people had a much easier time finding them ("Manage a
> Project" is where you go to request conference lines, document and meeting
> management space, rather than Collaboration, then Connectivity). On the
> other hand, we always had to provide a second perspective for those who look
> for specific apps or technologies.
Does that mean that you also included items in multiple process/task
menus, such as for example "team room" both in "manage a project" and
"attend a meeting"?
> One other note about the Workplace category: I don't know how big the
> company is, or how refined your taxonomy will be, but only in a small-ish
> company would folks be able to meet "all of their workplace needs" under one
> category called Workplace. People use a tremendous number of resources in
No in fact the organisation is somewhat big.
Of course all other categories are also meant to me used in the context
of the user's work, the workplace label should include more or less all
tools for important, repeating "core" daily work.
May I ask for your suggestion? (:
Susan:
> Not sure whether you mean "top-down," as in you're making the
> decisions and users will be adopting whatever you decide on?
Actually I mean that we do not approach the project in a bottom-up way,
using content inventory techniques, categorizing and meta data, but we
try to create a hierarchical structure from the "upper side".
> The former might suggest not so much input from users.
In this organisation, in the past the users of the respective business
area were responsible themselves for the menu structure inside the
"workplace" menu. But in most cases, they just used their internal org
chart to group their menu items, in some rare cases they use business
processes for the menu folders, among with items such as "tools", "web
sites" or "databases".
So for our new approach, we are planning working closely with users for
each role, but we try to first create a "general" structure for the 2-3
top menu layers, which is valid for the whole portal (every role) and
it's apps/contents. User-centred approaches to this problem did not yet
result in homogenous labels and structures. The difficulty of course is
that our "persona" could be every single user in the whole company, in
deeper layers it is much easier to find the right people for user
research because there are concrete, business context specific problems
to solve.
Because this problem is common in every large organisation, I ask here
to find some "best practices" models for the top level, and then apply
user-centred techniques to the design of deeper levels and of single,
specialized business roles.
> But if you just mean the latter, I'd suggest investing effort into
> initial discovery--i.e., finding out how users already organize these
> concepts, literally, physically, and how they frame them up in their
> minds (i.e., "mental models")--as well as doing quick, frequent,
> iterative usability/validation testing to see how this schema works
> for the users. Up front you might want to do some card-sorting
Of course I am also interested in suggestions for doing user research
for a "everyone" user, in order to define the top level structure
matching user mental models.
> On a semantic note...not sure this is a "taxonomy." If it were the
> basis for multiple purposes (as per above---adopted and leveraged more
> broadly for multiple purposes, beyond internal portal navigation) it
> would be a taxonomy.
It will be a hierarchical structure mainly for the portal, but also
including the classic intranet and some custom apps, as well as
templates for solution and role design going from the user's desktop to
single content elements. So navigation schema seems appropriate to me,
thanks!
milan
--
milan guenther * interaction design
||| | | |||| || |||||||| | || | ||
designing the information workplace
+49 173 285 66 89 * www.guenther.cx
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