May 21, 2003

Site Design for eMarketers

Information Architecture: Succeed or Fail!! 10:20am – 10:50am

About Miller Systems

Miller Systems: A Premier Web Engineering Firm in Boston

Founded 1995

2002 Inc 500 & Deloitte & Touche Fast 50

150+ Completed Projects

Agenda

Discuss how Information Architecture affects design, user experience, and ultimately results

How site visitor requirements drive the right information architecture 

How to achieve One-to-Many personalization without breaking the bank

How navigation affects sales and company image

How all of this gets you "beyond brochureware" and drive targets to action

Information Architecture

Information Architecture defined

Why is it so important?

Site Development Process

User Experience always drives technology decisions and IA

IA drives Creative

Creative and content enable production

QA, Testing, deployment

Measure

Make adjustments

Tools and portals for project and change management

Identify your constituency and goals

Who am I speaking to?– Define the audience(s)

What am I selling?– The solution mix– The value proposition

What’s my desired call to action?– Online purchase– Register for event/newsletter– Phone call/web form to sales– Email someone @ the company

Content Dictates Interface

Listen, Listen, Listen to the content

A page for every idea is not always a good idea

Successful Call to Action

Be smart with Persistent Elements

Put the right stuff next to the right stuff; contextually sensitive content, links, and actions make for successful sites

Don’t underestimate the intelligence of your visitor!!

Don’t bury stuff (hierarchy in content doesn’t need to mean multiple clicks

Get Personal!

Audience-specific interstitial pages– Think of all content from this

perspective; news, events, as well as std stuff

Don’t make a visitor swim through the product/service mix to figure out what’s right for them

Niche company vs. Big Company

Execution: Usability & Persistence

Phone, Fax, Email

Form

People Scroll!! It’s OK to have a long page if it’s a good page.

Site Maps for small sites are redundant.

Examples

Boston Society of Architects

BSA – three ways to navigate

BSA Calendar

BSA Interns page

Examples

Miller Systems

Tips & Tricks

Train everyone at once – Get all the service providers in one

room, one time, to serve up the Kool-Aid

– Syndicate content, applications, and other data elements throughout your site where appropriate

Try not to make decisions by committee – put the IA in charge

KISS/Common Sense

One Vision, Many executions

Notes for bigger organizations

Enterprise Class CMS can solve many of these problems automatically on an ongoing basis

Your Enterprise Portal should go through the same kind of IA process

Use your Business Intelligence tools to measure how effective through scenario analysis

Good Reference Materials

Books– Anything by Edward Tufte (http://www.edwardtufte.com

)

– “Dynamics of Software Development”, Jim McCarthy

– “The Design of Everyday things”, Donald A. Norman

Software– Microsoft Visio (http://www.microsoft.com/office/visio/)

– Inspiration Software (http://www.inspiration.com/)

Q&A

Let’s Talk!