Architecting people, places and things meant knowing all the scenarios in which a user might try to find something or someone but not know its "correct" name, or whether it even exists.  We interviewed several types of users and found that one role in particular needed to be satisfied with the design more than the others: a medical secretary.  She uses the information on the intranet more than many and under significant time pressure.  For this reason, I depicted her circumstances as a persona and three scenarios (pdf) in which she used this system.

We visioned, storyboarded and wrote a UED for this application before beginning to prototype pages.  In the course of translating the design from storyboard to UED, the challenge was to link everything meaningfully.  This meant presenting internal resources so that their relationship to other resources was obvious and accessible. It was in the UED stage that we found profiling all the "nouns" would give us a destination layer from which we could mark out how these destinations could point to each other. 

Defining the destination layer also allowed us to connect functionality available in other intranet applications to this core reference site.  The second step of prototyping this site involved using search results to anticipate what the user actually needed to find versus what they thought they needed.  This meant we had to prototype functionality for a search engine that could give users synonyms and spelling alternatives, and show role or organizational information if names were similar.

We tested our prototypes in two waves, making changes from the results of the first wave before presenting to a different user group.  Second wave usability results (excerpted, pdf) showed that remaining challenges lay largely in the domain of integrating other intranet applications and databases with this one.

Alison Andrews :: allusionesque@yahoo.com :: (415) 690-6488 cell