Sunday, July 15, 2012

What's On the Menu?

Usability testing with the general public occurred early in this project and provided a useful foundation on which to design and build menus and meta-data tags. Not surprisingly a large proportion of those interviewed  said that they used external search engines (mostly Google) to locate information and services. Others would browse menu options IF they made sense to them and only a few clicks were required to locate desired information.
Screenshot of the top menu for new DoE public Internet site
A great deal of consultation has taken place to develop the menu that will appear at the top of pages. 'Mega-menu' tags reflect different public audiences and about 50 sub-menu tags provide internally consistent browsing options. The menus are not built around organisational units and this is a radical departure from past practice which has challenged teams to rethink why and what they publish online for public access. 

Brief accessibility testing with the popular JAWS screen reader indicates that the menus can be read.

A left hand SharePoint generated menu also exists and this will be discussed in a later post.
  
Posted by Roger Stack at 9:08 AM
Labels:

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Would "teachers" be one of the audiences?

August 2, 2012 at 7:37 AM
Roger Stack said...

Teachers will be a key audience for the Intranet and usability testing will soon begin with teachers, support staff and others.

While a teacher audience has been considered in the design of the new Internet site priority has been given to the needs of parents and carers, local and international students, partners, providers and members of the community.

August 2, 2012 at 8:10 PM

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)