Hello! we are redesigning a corporate website and a couple of things have come up which I'm not entirely convinced by.
--I should mention I'm the only information architect/usability bod on the team (something quite new to this company) and the internal client has a lot of sway having been in charge of content forever. The site is also principally in Spanish, so the headings and examples I give here are approximations --- I'm looking for alternative solutions to the following: 1. External employee access to the intranet. Currently the link says "Online/virtual office" and is included in the same menu as "Join our team", "Publications" and a section for companies to register as providers; "Contracts for tender". They've agreed to change the label as I said it could mislead people (clients) into thinking they can access some kind of online account. There are no other similar links, it currently triggers a dialogue box with log in fields; there's no explanation of what it is or who it's for, which makes me think it should not be at all prominent; employees should(?) recognise where to find it after the first visit and/or an internal email. Obviously we could add the login to an actual page where we explain it's only for employees, which might be a slight improvement. So my question is: (i) Where would you put this link? Is it enough for it to have a different colour to the other links in the same resources menu? I'm thinking in the footer might be best. (ii) What would you call it? I thought something like "Employee access" or "Intranet access" would be appropriate. The current most popular label is "Employee zone", though I do wonder if this sounds like potential employees may find information there. There is also going to be another section "Provider zone" to which access is not restricted (contracts for tender, contracts awarded and how to become a provider). I think having 2 "zones" - one internal and one public - is confusing, though probably not the end of the world - once you've tried the links. I hope to get some card sorting and usability testing done at some point, but if the rest of the team is unanimous on the zone labels, it may be hard to persuade them of the need for it. 2. The main menu is being reduced to the basics, but that currently means we will have Corporate Information and Corporate Responsibility right next to each other. Is this too much "Corporate" for one menu? The alternative was to have Corporate Responsibility Plan under Corporate Information and a separate section, Social Commitment in the main menu - (a new section that the company wants to highlight and expand on, hence its prominence). 3. While I'm here I'll pick your brains for one more thing: What would you call a section that had corporate flash videos, logos, corporate brochures (PDFs) all together? I have a few ideas regarding this, but I won't mention them for the moment to not contaminate any ideas and gut reactions out there! It's not all bad, I'm making some headway with things that don't work that well such as a tendency to upload corporate brochures and leaflets as PDFs instead of digging out the interesting bits and converting them to HTML; defining link styles - currently the text and links have an array of different styles - you can never tell which will open a new window, a flash presentation or what; eliminating or reducing the importance of pages that are rarely updated, and so on. Many thanks for your time and thoughts, Elizabeth ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... disc...@ixda.org Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
