Thanks to everyone for your support, input and suggestions; it's great to have a sounding board (especially as I am currently a one person team on this project!).
In answer to your questions: As of last week we have had Google Analytics added to the site, which is already giving us a lot of the information we sorely needed (as pointed out by William and Ivy). Currently 98% of the traffic is heading towards that employee login! However, this may be because the site is not well publicised. Up until now it has been a necessity, but not a marketing tool in any way (a corporate decision). However, it looks like there is a new corporate strategy about to be embraced, promoting services, which would require much more visibility and which would obviously affect the architecture. The original reason for the redesign - and a good opportunity to update and refresh its look and organization - was compliance with accessibility laws and standards. Heuristic, accessibility and a basic SWOT analysis have been conducted (the first things I did when I started there). Prior to that they did interview the members of the board and sent out questionnaires to shareholders and other users (but I think that was in 2005-6, yep, things move slowly!). As you can tell, usability and interaction design techniques are quite new to this client, so it's a question of showing them the possibilities and improving the methodology bit by bit. There are plans to train some interns in this field, so at least they are open to ideas (as long as they don't require too much time and resources of course! hehe). Anyway, thanks to all (Bryan, Peetri, Ivy) for suggesting alternatives. "Employee login" or "Intranet login" as a visible log in box on the home page makes a lot of sense, and the "About" section avoids the "corporate" label duplication. Paul, thanks for the suggestions and pointers to resources. I completely agree that this needs to be user-focused, though at the moment because of the internal politics and structure, I would not have access to all the key shareholders (I'm subcontracted which reduces my status even more!). However, I have extracted some info from the questionnaires and hopefully Google Analytics will give me some more direction. bit by bit I hope to go addressing these obstacles. Regarding card sorting, yep, I think it is essential. That I think I can do by email within the company, which would at least be a start. Scenarios and personas will be the next challenge! Kind regards, Elizabeth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Posted from the new ixda.org http://www.ixda.org/discuss?post=37401 ________________________________________________________________ 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
