AICPA.org
A Web site for the national professional organization of Certified Public Accountants.
Situation
The American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA) found that its Web site did not meet member needs. In addition, its architecture created operational inefficiencies and prevented AICPA from staying current with technology.
My involvement
Working with stakeholders throughout AICPA, I did the following:
- Web strategy: Defined the operational goals for the site and the features to support it.
- Information architecture design and testing: Conducted a full content inventory and reorganized the content and labeling based on users’ mental models–not on organizational structure.
- Wireframing and prototyping: Wireframed all page templates. These are designed to scale easily to different types of content and work well with a Sharepoint / Endeca powered environment. In addition, they provide affordances for the social networking features that are planned for future releases.
- Usability testing: Conducted remote card sorts and scenario-based tests to refine and validate the architecture.
- Content strategy: Wrote the strategy that identifies the objectives for the new Web site, the rationale for architectural decisions and tips for writing and organizing content for the Web. Produced training materials for content creators.
- Design concepts: Created an early round look-and-feel concept.
- Various information graphics: Designed graphics to help clarify complex architectural and procedural concepts to non-technical stakeholders.
True Tale
We encountered a few emotional debates about architecture and nomenclature. Some stakeholders had trouble accepting the Web site should not necessarily reflect the org chart. In these cases, data from card sorting and usability testing gave us independent evidence to base our decisions. This limited arguments based on opinion and helped us make decisions on behalf of the user.
The Web site is scheduled for initial release in early 2010.
