Intranets in The Emerald City.

August 22, 2002 | 0 Comments

I just got back from an all day intranet redesign meeting with my team. All in all it went pretty well. For the most part we just worked on the information architecture of the intranet which, let me tell you, was not any easy task. Ha! Not that we are done by any means. Any progress is good however, as right now our intranet has tons of great information that is a bitch to find.

For those of you who don’t know - I work for a rather large hospital and aside from the vast amount of information to deal with there are always political type issues to deal with. It’s actually kinda fun. I know I’m sick.

Anyway. We spent most of the day trying to organize the content we had into logical groupings. It started off really well - the team split up into groups and we all took a stab. It was interesting to note how each group went about this exercise, some took to grouping the information by audience, others by task or type of information. In the end we went with a combination of these - for now anyway - with the content grouped into to major audience groups, “clinical” and “everything else” and then the other content grouped by type (for the most part) under that. Belonging to the “everything else” audience, I really feel that taking the “clinical” information and separating it will help narrow a users focus quite a bit. Hopefully we are one step nearer to a better, more usable intranet. Yee haw!

A lesson learned : when working on information architecture in a group be very careful not to get too caught up in semantics and labeling. I found that we spent all together too much time discussing what things should be called and not enough trying to group like content together. In the end it all worked out fine, but I see these tasks as two different animals. One a hungry lion, the other a rabid bear.

Oh my.

Filed under: IA and Usability