1. May 21, 2003 Site Design for eMarketers Information Architecture: Succeed or Fail!! 10:20am – 10:50am

2. About Miller Systems  Miller Systems: A Premier Web Engineering Firm in Boston  Founded 1995  2002 Inc 500 & Deloitte & Touche Fast 50  150+ Completed Projects

3. 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

4. Information Architecture  Information Architecture defined  Why is it so important?

5. 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

6. 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

7. Content Dictates Interface  Listen, Listen, Listen to the content  A page for every idea is not always a good idea

8. 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

9. 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

10. 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.

11. Examples  Boston Society of Architects

16. BSA – three ways to navigate

18. BSA Calendar

19. BSA Interns page

21. Examples  Miller Systems

25. 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

26. 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

27. Good Reference Materials  Books –Anything by Edward Tufte (http://www.edwardtufte.com)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/)http://www.microsoft.com/office/visio/ –Inspiration Software (http://www.inspiration.com/)http://www.inspiration.com/

28. Q&A  Let’s Talk!