Archive for the ‘work’ Category

Will Technology drive us all insane?

Friday, April 10th, 2009

I think the recent technologies are really fascinating, they evolve so quickly they’re quite entertaining in the way there’s always something to learn about. But at the same time, i can find it a bit hard to catch up with all of them and understand what each one can offer me better than the next one.

People of my kind – some say the geeks – have seen the emergence of a restless social online population, using Twitter over the world to join the biggest community online ever. Everybody without discrimination is connected every day to communicate with each other about pretty much anything. The popularity of this new channel already led over people’s privacy. ‘Lifestreaming’ became part of their lifestyle. “Everybody’s lets everybody else know what they’ve been up to, no matter what it it”. And i have to admit to be honest that I became myself one of them… Believe it or not, Lance Amstrong and of Shaquille O’Neal are my ‘friends’ and I can know what they’re up to everyday… Blogging is already too slow requiring too much content. Twitter is preferred because its format enables quicker communications. Consumers changed their way of communicating and prefer quick messaging to long blog posts. They talk about updates rather than messages. A good article in SMH showcased well, why technology has been driving consumers’ behaviors, which leads to the question: will technology ever be at its edge?

It is scary to imagine that technology might never be at its edge. It implies that people will always be changing the way they communicate to each other, the way they behave and the way they live, to an extent…

Redesigning the Corporate Intranet

Monday, February 9th, 2009

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:

  1. Content inventory and search reports analysis;
  2. Card sorting;
  3. IA testings (Card-based classification evaluation);
  4. 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.