BottomUp Information Architecture:

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Bottom-Up Information Architecture

• Re-Design of an Enterprise Class Web Site

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The Project

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VeriSign, Inc

• In business since 1995
• Network Infrastructure provide security for
  Internet and Communication transactions
• Acquired a number of companies in a short period
  of time

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VeriSign Web Properties Team

• Within Corporate Marketing
• Web Properties has 2 segments
• Engineering
• Web Publishing
• Producers
• HTML developers
• IA was brought in as a consulting role for site
  re-design project

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The Problem

• Organically grown web site
• Conglomeration of numerous different sites
• Normalization process was done, but it was a
  band-aid for a patient on life support
• Broken Navigation
• Useless search
• Static web pages. Updated manually by web team.

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Findability Issues!

• Users were unable to find needed content
• Surveys revealed that customers felt like
  hostages on the web site
• Search was practically useless
• Not inspiring confidence with the user experience
• Content lacked substance

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Solution

• Re-architect and re-design web site from the
  bottom up
• Implement content management system (CMS)
• Improve search

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Consultant Advisory Board

• Peter Morville Information Architecture
• Bob Boiko Content Management
• Avi Rappoport Search

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About Me

• I was tasked with taking the advisors
  suggestions and implementing them
• Information Architect consultant with 8 years
  experience
• Trained in Library and Information Sciences

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3 main objectives

• Create metadata schema to improve search and
  implement CMS
• Develop controlled vocabularies needed for
  metadata
• Content types
• Products and services
• Create templates for CMS
• Improve navigation and layout
• Support CMS implementation

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Site Re-Design

• Business Requirements
• Content analysis
• Audience analysis
• Competitive analysis
• Visual design
• Specification
• Implementation (within the CMS)

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Business Requirements

• Support users in every phase of the customer
  lifecycle
• Provide consistent navigation and page layout
• Support the companys brand
• Develop a metadata structure that supports
  information management and findability

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Content Analysis

• Formulated list of content types
• Gathered representative examples of all content
  types
• Analyzed content, user needs and business
  requirements for each content type
• Formulated specifications for some content types

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Audience Analysis

• Gathered information about users from
• Site Satisfaction Survey
• Interviewing product groups and support
  organizations
• Different user groups for different products
• Systematic approach for gathering data
• Mapped audience type to each product group,
  identified necessary content required for each
  phase of customer lifecycle
• Data analyzed to surface patterns

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Competitive Analysis

• Different aspects of information architecture
  were analyzed
• Navigation
• Search
• Page layout
• Analysis based on industry, type of content and
  size of business

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Visual Design

• Outside agency brought in
• Bottom-up IA analysis drove the visual design
• They also performed a brief top-down analysis
• New navigation scheme was adopted
• Representative templates were developed to
  showcase new design system

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Before
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After
After
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Specification

• Mapped all content to the new templates
• Individual pages defined
• All elements for pages were specified

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Content Management System

• Goals
• Provide a distributed publishing model throughout
  the company while maintaining consistency and
  control over UI and navigation
• Allow for easier updates and changes to the web
  site (reduce cost)
• Implement metadata

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CMS Implementation

• Inventoried content
• Developed corporate taxonomy
• Provided style sheet and wireframes for all
  templates
• Developed detailed site map for all content

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CMS Templates

• Mapped current content to existing templates
• Created new templates where required, providing
  wireframes and style sheet
• Outlined revised publishing system and governance
  rules, based on CMS capabilities, business needs
  and company culture

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Metadata

• Developed specifications for the Resource
  Library, a central repository and search
  interface for the companys digital resources
• Metadata-driven search with multiple entry points
  throughout the web site

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Search

• Improved technical aspects of search
• Updated software
• Configured server
• Mirrored indexing
• Improved user interface
• Removed unnecessary information for users
• Refined key word in context highlighting
• Changed navigation
• Added usable verbiage
• Reformatted promotional information

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Search

• Added Quick Links feature (commonly called best
  bets)
• Improved quality of search results data
• Weighted more relevant information
• Trained content owners in constructing page
  titles and creating useful metadata
• Defined process for continued analysis of search
  traffic reports to monitor, update and improve
  search results as needed.

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Before
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After
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Results

• Corporate section of web site to go live May 19,
  2004
• Site traffic will be analyzed and compared to
  baseline statistics. Hope to see 20 improvement
  in site traffic and user satisfaction.

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Lessons Learned

• Site Re-Design and CMS Implementation
• Huge undertaking both done simultaneously
• It was vital that the project be done this way
• The re-design was primarily a re-architecture of
  the existing site
• It would have doubled the work and probably would
  have sabotaged the success of the project to do
  the CMS implementation first and site redesign
  second.
• It was imperative to provide a solid and
  extensible information infrastructure for the
  companys growth into the next 5-8 years.

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Resources

• Learned that is was important to rely on existing
  expertise in the company rather than import a lot
  of temporary, external help.
• Doing this made this an 18 month long project
• Helpful, given the complex nature of the business
  and its information needs (it wasnt easy to
  bring new people up to speed in order for them to
  do their job effectively).
• All the above reasons made this a purely
  bottom-up IA project

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Pure Bottom-Up IA

• Bottom-up was required
• All previous top-down efforts had failed
• Complex business
• Unstable, constantly changing landscape
• Limited resources
• Successful completion of all project goals and
  objectives!

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The End