REFLECTION PAGE - Lesson 9

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The case study for MSWEB takes on a vast immense job of assessing MSWEB and variety of things to fix. The major point covered in the polar text are 3 taxonomies used, the IA made to support it, and how the team revamped the MSWEB intranet.

With approximately 3,100,000 pages and 50,000 employees who work in 74 countries and 8,000 sep internet sites, the IA team has a huge task infront of them. Trying to determine where to begin is a large undertaking and some places were obvious but some points where scattered throughout the site. They found that navigation systems not consistent due to various labeling schemes. All the possible labels are hard to search for and retrieve; there are too many variations.

Some places had different concepts for same label. That can surely be confusing to the user. So employees frustrated because they don't know when to stop searching.
There are 50 different variants to product vocabulary. This can also cause concern, frustration and difficulty finding information or to know when you are done searching.

Some IA is inhouse contained and built by inhouse technical staff and other areas are maintained by hand or simple tool like MS Frontpage. By definition, taxonomy is about a specialized system for naming and organizing things, especially plants and animals, into groups which share similar qualities.

It holds three key points.
1. descriptive vocabularies-controlled vocabularies over a specific domain
2. metadata-collection of information about a particular document
3. category labels-set of terms used for navigation systems

Characteristics of their content determined several steps the team took to get started.
First was a search log anaylysis-needs in users own terms to decide appropriate vocabulary terms. They looked for vocabulary that already existed from inhouse work--don't reinvent the wheel. Other issues considered at the start was politics, talking with stakeholders about concepts, and commitment and thier level of participation. They focused on vocabularies with broad appeal.

They narrowed the vocabulary to certain subjects: geography, languages, proper names, organization and business names, subjects and product/standards/technology names. Metadata and controlled vocabulary will describe content.
They focused on simplicity, balance, description for display, integration into browsing schemes. They decided on core field schema's: URL title, URL Description, URL, ToolTip, Comment, Contact Alias, Review Date, Status, Strongly Recommended, Products, Category label, Keywords. So all three taxonomies come together and were used to create search results. Dublin Core schema partially used.

VocabMan, visual basic client providing access to MDR. VocabMan was used to create thesauri relationships ie heirarchical equivalence and associative between terms within specific taxonomies and between terms in different taxonomies and as a workbench for managing, creating, and tagging records.

Some of their successes include, since the company has so many employees, this provides a wide area of opportunity as a test bed for improvements. They selected a major area to work on that benefited both users, employees and managers. They made the improvements in a modular fashion thereby making the improvements applicable to other areas within the project and across the company. The design was flexible across departments so it spoke to not just other IA's but to technical communication, designers, and strategists. The teams efforts saved the company money while in baby steps but was significant to support the primary goals as they rolled out.

Some of the benefits to users, prompted them to take a look at some of the problems such as too many clicks, inaccessible documents and too hard to search for them - awakened the need for improvement. Measurable changes of the task success rate was +10.7%, time on task -16 seconds, and number of clicks -8 clicks where it used to be +13 clicks... big changes.

Another case study involves evolt.org where they developed an IA with almost no budget.
They are a world community for web developers, promoting the mutual free exchange of ideas, skills and experiences which was prompted out of rapid growth of members/registered users. evolt has classes and thier allowed levels of participation=anyone level, member level, administrator level.
Discussion list postings, tips, published articles, authors, readers, receives/pays, biography listings, new ventures, free communities,

Web Theory: An Introduction by Robert Burnett and P. David Marshall and chapter 1 called Web of technology starts off with a blast from the past description about the growth of the web and directions and possibilities it was headed into which ironically are all unfolding. Virtual reality and information and technology paths are taking most of the paths that Nicolas Negroponte describes in his book, Being Digital.

The promise of a better world with webs capabilities towards communication and expanding our horizons in the media world and fast paced expanding media world.

Technology is determined to expand and take the world into new and ever demanding technologies. What became apparent is the demands for communication, and how were people going to interact with the new technologies becoming available. Cyberspace was becoming the place for the chat, correspondence, digital imagery, fast paced business opportunities and more.

Approaches of how to offer these kinds of resources to the world was obviously needed to be managed and organized and done well so that users would use sites which tumbled the snowball of visibility, commerce and competition. Access to computers was blooming fast like televsion sets bloomed when they were 'born'. Instant images over the space and time, thusly instant communication and reaching audiences over the computer screen.

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