Big thanks again to Lynne Polischuik for her great organization efforts and including me in the event.

The City is not a Site Map*
*with apologies to Christopher Alexander

World IA Day 2012, Vancouver
February 12, 2012

Gordon Ross, VP/Partner, OpenRoad

http://www.openroad.ca/

http://twitter.com/gordonr

Happy World IA Day!

As information architects and interaction designers, I think it’s safe to say that many of you in the audience would agree that we get to work on some pretty challenging problems.

And from the IA types that I meet locally and at conferences I’ve attended, it also strikes me that many of us find deep satisfaction in the work – it often has a great personal resonance with us. A meaningful problem that connects with a part of who we are, not just something technically demanding.

Well, I can count working with the City of Vancouver a couple of summer’s ago as one of those wonderful collisions of intense professional challenge and deep personal connection. I was born here in Vancouver, grew up in the burbs and have lived here my entire life. And I’ve had this nascent interest in cities for quite some time, and I’ve always been fond of Vancouver’s short, but fascinating history.

COV HOMEPAGE

So when we were selected to perform the information design work for COV’s website redesign, it wasn’t without a bit of trepidation that I approached the project. 60,000 page website, approximately 12 years old and growing by several hundred pages / month, 7 million visits / year from citizens and those abroad, several million dollars’ worth of e-service transactions – and the mandate from the City to fix it – it wasn’t meeting expectations, it was difficult to find information, – the information equivalent of some sort of urban sprawl gone bad.

One of the big design problems the City was facing is a classic IA design anti-pattern: a big chunk of the City’s 60,000 page website was designed around their org chart.

ORG CHART

Anyone else seen this? Hands up for those of you who have worked on a redesign project in the past couple of years that mirrors this design pattern?

WHY IS THIS A PROBLEM?

So why is this is a problem? What’s so bad about designing a website around an organizational structure, especially a big organization like the City?

CITIZEN

Because citizens don’t get it. By organizing information in this matter, citizens need to understand the design of the City’s bureaucracy in order to navigate to the right spot in order to engage with the City in the provision of a service or information.

And, most citizens don’t appear to be terribly interested in making this investment in learning how their local government organizes itself. They have places to go, things to do, people to see, jobs to get done, families to raise, traffic to battle on a daily basis, garbage to put out in their alley, parking tickets to pay, and a plethora of other things that constitute their daily urban existence.

Learning about the City’s org chart doesn’t rank high as a priority.

So how do we categorize information in a way that people understand it?
Isn’t that *the question* when it comes to all of our design projects?

DETOUR
Hold that thought. I want to take a quick detour here.

Chicken, Cow, Grass. Silently write down (or type) down which one of these DOES NOT BELONG.

Ok.
Everyone who said cow, standup
Everyone who said grass, standup
Everyone who said chicken, standup
Fun.

NISBETT

So we just replicated an experiment that Richard Nisbett describes in his book the Geography of Thought to demonstrate the different mental models of “western” and “eastern” cultures – primarily those influenced by a Greek philosophical tradition and those influenced by Asian philosophies.

MONKEY
This experiment has also been run in its popular and ridiculously CUTE OVERLOAD Monkey, Panda, Banana variation with similar results.

CUTE OVERLOAD

But I wanted to spare you the danger of running it today.

And the crux of the categorization schema is that western types usually lump chicken and cow together because they are both animals, part of the same class of being, and eastern subjects tend to lump cows and grass together because cows eat grass – they have a relationship with each other, whereas chickens don’t. Now I’ve done this with people who lived on farms and I’ve been told that chickens do in fact eat grass from time to time, but bear with me.

RICHARD SAUL WURMAN
Point of this lovely little thought experiment is something that every IA should know and use when working with their clients, large and small, and that is that categorization is an ambiguous schema. The man we have to thank for the term IA, Richard Saul Wurman, points that out with his LATCH acronym – the 5 ways we have to organize information, 3 of which are unambiguous: Location, Alphabet and Time and the other two ambiguous ones, Categorization and Hierarchy (or continuum).
So backyard chicken / City of Vancouver Jokes aside, this was the entry point for me to try to get City staff thinking differently about how to organize the site. I had the City management team perform that same thought experiment in a presentation. I convinced them that maybe the chicken was the odd one out and not the grass after all.

FRUSTRATED USER
So you might be thinking, yeah, man, let’s avoid ambiguous categorization and stick with something safer: let’s focus on the user. focus on the user! Of course! the user! Now I’ve seen many well intentioned civic governments adopt a design pattern that starts with the user. And puts them into one of 3 major buckets:

To Delta and Nanaimo locally to such high profile cities as New York City and San Francisco, this IA design pattern has been replicated over and over and over again:

Resident, Business, Visitor.

Now I’m opposed to this schema. And here’s why. Putting these 3 choices in front of the user when they hit the front of your website is like holding up a giant cognitive and existential stop sign.

And that stop sign is this question: WHO AM I? or rather, WHO DOES THE CITY THINK I AM?

And once you’ve figured that one out, then ask yourself, “WHAT AM I DOING HERE AGAIN?”

and then you have to merge those two constructs back together and ask,
“BASED ON WHO THE CITY THINKS I AM, WHERE WOULD THEY PUT WHAT I”M LOOKING FOR TO HELP ME GET DONE WHAT I’M HERE TO GET DONE…”

And once you’re through that door, it’s
“UH, WHAT DEPARTMENT AM I LOOKING FOR?” WHO AM I AGAIN?

You can see why this is an issue.

CALL CENTER GIRL

The questions we should be asking, if we could speak with the citizen or business or visitor is “Hi, how can I help you today? What are you trying to accomplish? And perhaps even the question of “Why?” to help understand our visitor’s motivations, provide some context in assisting them.

But most civic governments don’t have the ability to ask their website visitors what they’re looking for or what they’re trying to accomplish every time they visit, so they conveniently use another internally focused categorization schema to organize content.

ANTI IA GUY
So to recap, I’m can now be clearly labelled in IA circles and bad mouthed on twitter as being anti-org-chart and anti-audience-segment. and that covers about 80% of the the civic websites I’ve ever seen.

Well, what are am I suggesting?

PERSONAS
Well, all hyperbole aside, I do believe starting with the user is the right place. We derived personas with City of Vancouver staff using some nifty narrative techniques. We grazed through about 4000 citizen survey responses, including a wealth of open-ended question data, we mined 311 call log data, and everyday we did some observational research to and fro City Hall and throughout our travels in the city.

And one thing that became apparent during our research was what I perceived as a figure/ground problem.

FIGURE GROUND
All you designers should be familiar with this famous image from gestalt psychology…

CITY OF VANCOUVER
And that problem is that in every conversation and every interaction we were having, there were two competing images: the city of Vancouver and the City of Vancouver. And one was clearly the figure and the other was the ground. And more often than not, they were competing against each other.

CITY HALL

I called this the small-c-city / large C City problem.

CITY/CITY
And my hunch was, that in order to better serve the Large C City in its ability to service the citizens of Vancouver and users of its website, we needed to better understand the small c city, the thing that most people think of first when we’re talking about Vancouver.

And that led to this question.

What is a city?

Thankfully, someone had asked that question before. Google told me so.

MUMFORD
His name is Lewis Mumford. And I even owned the book at home with the essay inside of it, a remarkable text called The City Reader.

In his own words then….

The city in its complete sense, then, is a geographic plexus, an economic organization, an institutional process, a theatre of social action, and an aesthetic symbol of collective unity. The city fosters art and is art; the city creates the theatre and it is the theatre. It is in the city, the city as theatre, that man’s more purposive activities are focused, and work out, through conflicting and cooperating personalities, events, groups, into more significant culminations.

- Lewis Mumford, What is a City? 1938
Wow. Now we’re onto something. And it was written in 1938. Bravo Mr Mumford.

In case you missed all of that, here’s the bullet point version:

Geographic plexus
Economic organization
Institutional process
Theatre of social action
Aesthetic symbol of collective unity

So really, the small c city isn’t so small after all – it is *the city*, the aesthetic symbol of our collective unity.

SMALL C / BIG C

Small c city of Vancouver= that which is in focus for most of the citizens, most of the time

Big C City of Vancouver = that which they come into contact with, but might not even realize it

Municipal government, has a remarkable impact on our daily lives, but for many citizens, it’s simply invisible. I’ll get back to that important thought in a bit.

And this figure/ground thing finally congealed into some kind of conceptual IA design manifesto for myself and my partner in crime on the project, our Sr UX Designer at OpenRoad Selma Zafar part way through that summer. Here’s what we wrote:

OUR CITY IA MANIFESTO

How I, the citizen, understand Vancouver as a physical location and collection of social facts is going to permeate and dominate my understanding of the institution that shares in the governance of its existence; therefore,
we, as designers and maintainers of the website, need to align the experience of dealing with the institutional City as closely as possible to the experience of the geographic, social, and economic city in hopes that we can connect to the citizen’s mental models and achieve an intuitive website experience.

Now for many of you here in the room, the simple assumption that a website will be based on the mental model of the end user and not some top-down taxonomy that you come up with in your cubicle cranking away in Visio or Omnigraffle, is a pretty obvious truth to how you work. And that’s great. But for a lot of people in the world, many of the clients of our professional services work, have not yet made that leap.

This is still a revolutionary thought. And it is revolutionary because it has broad implications.

One such implication was in the midst of a presentation to City staff, a senior employee team verbalized the implications of redesigning the City’s website to reflect something more citizen centric, more aligned with the way people exist in the city, and what that might mean for the future service provision for the city as a whole and its organizational structure.

The thought process isn’t too hard to follow: if our old site was based on our org chart and was essentially a mirror for how we are structured, what happens to our org chart when we get a new way of presenting ourselves to the public?

Or, asked another way, what if the new IA was a new org chart for the City?

This is a profound thought. And one that’s easy to ask but kinda scary to answer. If you think re-org’ing a 60,000 page civic website is hard, try re-orging a 9000 person civic bureaucracy.

So we started to work on a categorization schema that pulled in as much as we knew about the real world of living, working, and playing in Vancouver that we could during our project. We went broad as well as deep. We found great inspiration in simply looking at other examples of how Vancouver (and other cities as well) were represented using the fundamentals of LATCH – location, alphabet, time, categorization, and hierarchy.

MAP SLIDE
We found rich, deep, and insightful representations wherever we looked. (great opportunity for images and slides)

And I think the challenge for IA”s, once you let yourself start to explore a topic like an IA for a City and start asking yourself questions of “What is a city?” and “how do city’s work?” and “do city’s themselves have information architectures?” – I think the hard part once you’ve started down that path is coming to some kind of decision. Because design is decision making. And at some point, real artists ship, right? Our project had a timeline and a budget and at some point, we just had to produce something…

So for the remaining few minutes I’ve got up here, I want to share with you not the final IA that we came up with, I’ll leave that for the day the City re-launches their vancouver.ca site, which I hear from the team is happening soon.

Instead, I’d like to share with you a specific artifact that we left with them, which I hope might be of use and inspiration to some of you in your future IA work as well.

DESIGN IMPLICATIONS
We called it the “design implications” deck for short hand, and that expression comes from, if you trace it far enough back,

POLAR BEAR
the first edition of the Polar Bear book that really made an impression and so wonderfully defined a genre for me. My parents still didn’t understand what I did all day long, but I knew that it had a name. And that was exciting.

CHAPTER 11
In that book, Lou and Peter unpacked the black box of information design in a little table somewhere in Chapter 11 that could easily go unnoticed by the reader. That little table has 3 headings: observation, conclusions, IA implications. And that, for me anyhow, is the basis of all design work that we do. We observe stuff out in the “real world” – we then make conclusions about those observations, an answer to the question, “Well so what if you saw that out in the big wild world.” and from there we ask ourselves another “So What question” – well so what does that mean for the design of the site. And as we walk up some of the rungs of the ladder of inference as it’s known (which can be frought with some slippery steps and rickety ladders along the way), we make sense of our work and help people understand what we saw, why it matters, and what we’re going to do about it.

Observations, Conclusions, and Design Implications. Simple & Powerful.

CITY DECK
For the City, I added what I deemed most significant thematically into our design implications deck – knowing full-well that our time on the project would end and we might be handing our work over to another team to build the site, which did in fact happen. This deck I hoped would become a bridge, an important design artifact, and remind future designers of some of the rationale behind why we designed something a certain way. It forced us to be reflective, explicit practitioners, something as professionals in a discipline that is again in its pretty early days compared to other professions out there, felt like the right thing to do.

It hopefully connected the observations of the authors (accumulated through design research, in-person interviews, staff workshops, citizen surveys, and more) to the practical hands-on task of designing the new website.

It is intended to ground the designer in the ideas that shape the city of Vancouver, transforming abstract civic concepts into tangible website design interventions. Along with the deck of standard IA deliverables (wireframes, personas, presentations, and IA spreadsheets) this was an important souvenir for the project.

SUBWAY MAP
The deck starts with few provocations, one of which I shared with you from Lewis Mumford from his essay What is a City. I included quotes from Alex Marshall’s book “How Cities Work” – I quoted at length an extract from an interview with urban design guy and recovering IA Adam Greenfield and I included this wonderful map and piece of inspired IA in the back of the book “Cities from A to Z”.

The lines are “history, settlement, technology, commerce, pleasure, nature, traffic, and dis/order”

The stops are things like “grafitti” and “bus shelters” and “dancing” and “pigeons”

All of these had an impact on us as we did our work during the project.
We then went into our design implications section proper, which included the following subject areas that we thought were large enough forces at play that had shaped our thinking and influenced our rationale behind the design of the site.

Some you might easily guess if you were doing this project, others we found interesting and perhaps a bit surprising.

I’ll highlight a sample one, so you can get a flavour of the document.

This one is titled “Jurisdictional Boundaries” and it’s a design implication I believe is present for all levels of gov’t (civic, regional, provincial, federal) to really improve upon.

Jurisdictional Boundaries

Observation:
Different levels of government are responsible for different aspects of our everyday lives. It is often not clear who is responsible for what.

Conclusion:

Citizens are interested in who is responsible in order to seek action and resolution to a particular issue. They have a problem that needs resolution and want to find out who to contact.

Design implication:

The seemingly arbitrary bi-products of the design of government need to be clearly communicated to the citizen user, even if the responsibility for the service is not entirely that of the City’s. Examples of jurisdictional boundaries that affect citizens include transportation (City owns streets, TransLink runs the buses); animal control (stray dogs are City, stray cats are BCSPCA); and water (pipes are City, water itself is Metro Vancouver).

We’d certainly seen confusion about why users were coming to the City’s website in the survey data “Answer: find bus schedules” – we thought the City had some responsibility for dealing with this issue. A design implication existed. And we tried to do something about it. In our wireframes we had paid some attention to these types of issues. This was an observation we deemed important, and attempted to highlight the implication for other classes of this occurrence that other designers might stumble across in their journey.

One of these on their own sounds simple. A couple of them manageable. 15 of them was a lot to juggle in our heads at any given time. We often referred to these in shorthand in the project as “it’s the mandatory task dynamic again” or “yeah, that’s a jurisdictional boundary thing.” –

In hindsight, we probably could have developed these sooner to help guide our design process,

SQUIGGLE

but as this lovely diagram demonstrates, design isn’t always that straightforward…

POSTCARDS
So this Design Implications document was like our little post-card to ourselves and to our future selves (us and other designers) about what we’d seen in our journey from the past.

Summary

I’m nervous, excited, and a bit worried about the re-launch as you can imagine. When you invest a lot of your time and energy and self into a project as a designer you become really attached to your work – I think that’s part of being a good designer and it’s also risky if you’re too close to it.

I hope it’s a success, users find what they are looking for, and it helps change the relationship that citizens have with the City. I believe in an effective public sector and I think, like Jess, that we have a great opportunity to work with them to make the public sector better.

And finally, I believe in the increasing importance of IA as a discipline, as it transforms into the medium independent / cross channel incarnation that Peter Morville just wrote about in the IA Journal. Because it’s there that we can help hold up a new mirror to an organization and help see themselves in different ways.

In that way, we really are hopefully Designing Structures for Understanding – be it with our public sector institutions, our big C cities and little-c cities, and even somewhere along the way, ourselves.

Thanks for listening.

Sara has a professional background in legal administration and small business. She has spent the past 6 years on Vancouver Island where she founded Sarandipity, an artisan manufacturer of organic chocolates. She loves spending time with her baby, eating her way around the world, and providing her OpenRoad colleagues with “s’mores” and other goodies.

Amol demonstrates strong leadership skills combined with a strong ability to communicate with people from various backgrounds. ThoughtFarmer utilizes Amol’s ability to work closely with clients and ensuring their vision is top priority.

Amol majored in History and minored in Philosophy at University of British Columbia. Amol lives with his wife and two children in North Vancouver, BC and enjoys reading, running and working on his garden.

Since joining OpenRoad, she has been involved in projects with BC Hydro, Electronic Arts, as well as our in-house Intranet product, ThoughtFarmer.

Andrea has managed a wide range of web technology projects from Drupal-based CMS, to custom .NET development, Facebook applications, and mobile integration projects. Prior to her career in software project management, Andrea honed her business skills doing brand management, production management, and international development for a fashion design and distribution company.

First up, Gordon Ross will be speaking at World IA Day, Vancouver on February 11, 2012. He’ll be joining a talented and thoughtful line-up of IA and design experts including Samantha Starmer (REI), Jess McMullin (Centre for Citizen Experience), Karyn Zuidinga (Analtyic Design Group), and Kara Pecknold (Dossier).

From the World IA Day website:

Imagine if everybody, everywhere understood why Information Architecture is such a valuable and powerful way of approaching complex information challenges. And that everybody, everywhere had a once-a-year opportunity to participate in a local event dedicated to connecting the global IA and UX community, exploring the practice of Information Architecture. That’s World IA Day.

WIAD 2012’s theme, Designing Structures for Understanding, will focus global conversations on this subject and provide a local venue to connect with leaders and peers. On February 11th, 2012, participants will gather in fourteen cities around the world to share stories, experiences and new ideas about our community of practice.

Registration for World IA Day Vancouver is now open. Don’t miss it!

And then next stop is Austin Texas for SXSW – the remarkable annual meetup of the best and brightest digital minds from across the world.

Gordon Ross will be speaking on Dave Gray’s Connected Company panel, along with Stowe Boyd, Thomas Vander Wal, and Susan Scrupski. From Dave’s talk description on the SXSW Panel Picker site:

French historian Fernand Braudel once said that a great city is an inventory of the possible. For thousands of years, cities have perfected the art of enabling complex social interactions at scale. A city is a social network, and so is a company. But there is a difference. As companies grow in size and complexity, they become less productive per capita. But as cities grow, they become more productive, by almost every measure. Why? It’s getting more and more difficult for companies to handle complexity: increasing customer demands for more customization, more convenience, lower costs and faster innovation. At some point the machine breaks down and companies just can’t handle it. The 21st-century company will have the same kinds of dense, dynamic, and complex properties of well-designed cities: fast pace, high energy, rapid innovation and high productivity. And some companies are doing this today. In our panel we will talk about who those companies are, what they are doing, why they are doing it, and how it works. We will show you how you can use the same principles to organize your company for a complex, networked, rapidly-changing global marketplace.

Gord’s fresh off a warm-up talk along similar lines having spoken with Thomas Vander Wal at E2Conf in Santa Clara back in November 2011.

For his write-up of the talk “What Urban Planning can teach Social Business Design” and the slides, head on over to the ThoughtFarmer blog or read a review of the talk from E2conf participant Catherine Shinners.

1.    Gestures

With touch screen devices, gestures provide insight on how participants understand the hierarchy of content.  A ‘swipe’ gesture indicates that they believe that there is content on the same level (they are going to the next page) whereas a tap can indicate that they are going to a child page.

2.    Postures

Postures provides insight into a wide range of usability issues.  The participants posture can indicate their level of engagement with the application as well as legibility issues in the UI.  If the mobile is brought closer to their face, then legibility is causing comprehension problems.  Font size or difficult to understand icons are common examples of legibility issues.  Hand and finger postures will provide insights into the level of confidence the participant has selecting within the UI. Switching hands during the session to move from using their thumb to interact with the UI to their index finger indicates that the user feels more reliable precision is required for the current task. This could be a cue that your tap area is too small.

3.    Tap Errors

With touchscreens, selecting items with your finger rather than through a hardware button provides greater UI flexibility.  With this flexibility brings greater room for design errors related to small tap areas.  Sometimes referred to as ‘fat finger syndrome’.  This is something that anyone with a touch screen device has experienced.  As the level of experience and comfort increase with the touch screen device, tap errors tend to decrease.  This problem varies from device to device depending on the screen calibration and personal settings.

When collected, these three attributes provide valuable insight to the true performance of the mobile design.

With these factors in mind, try to reduce these external factors by having participants use their own mobile devices during testing.

Gestures, postures and tap errors should be collected along with the other metrics of task success, satisfaction and ease of use. By noting and observing these 3 important areas, your mobile usability testing data and analysis will be more accurate, richer and more precise.  Recommendations made will represent the whole mobile interaction experience resulting in a better mobile user experience.

This diagram has since been used countless times in everything from proposals to client presentations. It has also appeared on our website since November 2010 without explanation. Internally we call it the “Football diagram” as it is much shorter phrase than “Business and User Requirements vs. Scope Diagram” and its shape resembles the uprights used in American football.

The Venn diagram

A typical strategy or user experience engagement with a client will include activities centred on two key focuses: understanding the organization or business and their needs, and understanding the users or customers and their needs. Business research might include workshops, stakeholder interviews, reviewing internal documentation, or other methods. User/Customer research might include customer interviews, interviews with front line staff that know the customers, call centre listen-ins, observational research, web analytics analysis, surveys or other methods. The result of all this research are two piles of findings: findings about the organization or business, usually in the form of strategy and requirements documents; and findings about the user/customer, usually in the form of personas and user requirements.

In any given instance there will be some (hopefully a lot) of commonalities between the two piles – needs or wants that the client and their customers have in common. There will also be some areas where the business and user needs do not overlap.

Our diagram, therefore, starts as a simple Venn diagram of overlapping circles:

Business Compromise and Seducible Moments

Obviously, the overlap between business and user requirements is the sweet place to be. Everybody wants the same thing. Everyone leaves satisfied. “Fast one-touch service” might be an example. We facetiously call this the “Maximum Value” position after those little starbursts used to inspire your purchase on ecommerce sites.

There are, however, two gray areas on either side of the Maximum Value position where lines must be drawn both in the sand and in the diagram.

There will be certain business requirements that arise (perhaps inspired by some think-out-of-the-box workshop brainstorming) that will never be cost effective, or will cost the business market share and thus the business will never implement. By the same token, there will be user requirements that come up that the business will never honour (“free shipping on everything!”). These positions are defined by the two vertical lines in the diagram, the “Will Do / Won’t Do” lines.

The “Won’t Do” positions chop the two circles to eliminate requirements on the outside that won’t be implemented in the foreseeable future.

The “Will Do” area, of course includes the sweet spot, the Maximum Value position. But you’ll notice that it includes more than just the sweet spot.

There may be some customer desires or needs that lie just outside the needs of the organization (outside Maximum Value) but won’t cause too much harm, grief, or effort so as to be outside the “Won’t Do” line. Some of these may be justified to include in scope to differentiate from competitors, build loyalty or retention, or increase word of mouth business. We call these “Business Compromise” requirements.

Likewise, there may be instances where the users may be swayed into performing an additional task that wasn’t part of their goal but helps the business out (“Sign up for our credit card”). Placement of these requirements within an online experience is crucial because if they present a barrier to the user goal then the customer may be lost altogether. Rather, the site needs to identify where the opportunities to suggest these secondary tasks are best received. User Interface Engineering principal Jared Spool calls these opportunities “Seducible Moments”. Thus, we call the area between Maximum Value and the Will Do line, the “Seducible Moments exploited” position.

Time and Money

The final constraint on any set of requirements is time and money. Some features are more feasible than others, have dependencies on a forthcoming version of a system, cost more, or have lower priority or less return. These types of features or requirements get set aside for later releases or future iterations.

We therefore complete our diagram to incorporate time, phases of the project, or priorities. A horizontal line divides the whole diagram in half with items above the line being in scope and those below the line being held for future consideration or as part of a phased roadmap.

This horizontal line completes the distinctive H shape in the centre of the diagram, which inspired the “Football” diagram moniker.

Items under the Time line, but within the Will Do lines will be in scope at some later date.

Uses as a tool

The Requirements vs. Scope diagram helps us filter our research for clients. Requirements that are identified during analysis need to end up within one of the areas in this diagram. The diagram itself serves as a great discussion tool in determining with clients where their boundaries are in terms of Will Do and Won’t Do requirements. The diagram also helps clarify the biggest opportunities for an organization in terms of where the most overlap between the client and their customers is.

At OpenRoad we look to the football diagram to help us wrap our heads around the mountain of data and requirements that we find ourselves buried under after conducting the research. It has served us well and won’t leave the repertoire anytime soon.

Amanda’s work in usability testing, with industrial design students at Emily Carr, was recognized at the 2010 Association for Canadian Ergonomists (ACE) Annual Conference, winning the ACE Undergraduate Award. A current member of the Vancouver User Experience (VanUE) Group and Student Representative for ACE, Amanda is committed to advocating for the user and creating great user experiences.

A full-stack developer, Ian can take projects from initial requirements, through design, database architecture, front- and back-end development, right through to deployment in a variety of server environments.

Prior to joining OpenRoad in July 2011, Ian was a freelance developer, working on large and small projects for clients on the Django application platform. His Python skills and Django knowledge have been a huge asset for clients such as Pokémon.

When not actively developing software, Ian spends his time with his family, taking his kids and dogs out to parks and beaches, and enjoys leaving small folded paper animals on the SkyTrain to be discovered by strangers.

The Insurance Corporation of British Columbia (ICBC) is a crown corporation that provides universal public auto insurance, driver licensing services, and road safety support for British Columbians. In order to fulfill their mandate, ICBC relies on a network of business partners to support customers, from 900 insurance brokers, to auto body shops, medical and paramedical practitioners, and driving schools around the province.

To support their network of business partners, ICBC created the Partners web property in the late 1990’s. Originally for Claims suppliers, the site grew ad hoc and organically over time to include subsections for other business partners. By 2010, the site had fallen behind not only OpenRoad’s 2008 redesign of the flagship site icbc.com, but also had some structural issues to address. It had a challenging organizational structure, inconsistent (or missing) navigation, poor support for contemporary browsers, and various ways of addressing content that required a login or download.

ICBC asked OpenRoad to assess the existing Partners website and redesign the site, and propose a new information architecture, navigation, page layout, and look and feel to provide a better user experience to their business partners, an up to date execution of their brand, and support of contemporary browsers.

OpenRoad’s first challenge was to determine how the existing site was being used and understand the relative use and importance of the site content. Unfortunately there was not a web analytics tool in place to provide any insight, but OpenRoad was provided some good old fashioned log files and applying some custom filters in a tool called SawMill, was able shed some light on the usage patterns of business partners. Combined with a user survey and requirements from stakeholders, we were able to reorganize the site to suit the tasks of business partners.

A new information architecture and wireframes followed, which delivered a clean hierarchy, a consistent navigation and elegant layout. A consistent scheme was applied to indicate downloadable content and that which required a username and password.

OpenRoad worked with frequent collaborator Cober Design for a visual design treatment that brought the site into the 21st century and brand compliance while addressing the unique needs of business partners. Clean standards compliant XHTML mark up ensured that the Partners site is lightweight and compliant with the latest browsers.

The new pages combined with a Google Analytics specification ensured ICBC’s internal development team had everything it needed to re-launch the site in May 2011. ICBC is proud of the new site and pleased that it has a design that can sustain future growth and the analytics to manage its performance ongoing.