INRS, Institut National de Recherche et de Sécurité (National Institute for Research and Safety), is the French national agency responsible for improving the health and safety of workers throughout the country. As part of a revision of their website, INRS engaged Kahn + Associates to recommend changes to their information architecture.
The project
INRS publishes and distributes a large body of literature, including various types of media aimed at different reading levels. These publications are meant for a diverse audience of employees, occupational medicine physicians, and worker safety professionals. Most of this material is created for print and meant to be viewed in libraries and the workplace. How can we exploit this rich set of documents and make them readable and accessible via a website? How can we make the site useful and interesting to the professional medical community while addressing the concerns of the small business director?
Our approach
1. Portion of the map of the existing site
K + A began by conducting a series of internal interviews, supported by a comprehensive mapping of existing website. In parallel, we conducted interviews with external users, representing INRS's diverse target audiences. The purpose of these two sets of interviews was to gather and understand user needs, usage scenarios, research behavior, and expected terminology. We were able to gather information on user habits, search practices, expected reading levels and preferences for media types. Our investigations led to the development of specific user profiles along with usage scenarios for each profile.
2. User type and usage scenario
Once the data was collected, we developed the new tree structure. This structure was presented to working groups we led with experts from INRS for discussion and validation.
3. New tree structure
After these discussions, we designed a few prototype page templates and conducted two interactive sessions to test the results with users. The purpose of these tests was to test the understandability of the features, verifying the points of entry, quantitative distribution, scale and readability of the new structure.
A new map was created to summarize all recommended semantic, organizational and technology changes. This document was presented to the INRS leadership in the form of slides and prints.
4. Map synthesizing our recommendations for the future site
The result
INRS is now ready to finalize plans for the production phase of the future site. Kahn + Associates continue to work with the project team to offer advice concerning how the recommendations are implemented.