Jonatan@natanoJ.dk

Keywords on what I worked with during this case: card sorting, wireframing, information ecology, sitemap construction

The Task

During my first internship I worked on my own at Dafolo Marketing (renamed to Corbiz). They had been given the assignment to develop a new Intranet for Europcar. The existing Intranet at Europcar was very old and was lacking structure because of the ad-hoc addition of items at the site. My assignment was to look at the existing content and reorganize it such that a new site structure could be developed.

In order to solve the task i made a simple card sorting exercise on my own to explore the ways in which it was possible to group the content. I also paid a visit at a car rental office in Aalborg to attain knowledge on how they used the Intranet and some feedback on my initial ideas for a new structure.

Qualifications

The main lesson from this task is that I got some first hand experience of what it means to work at a “real life” organization. When I afterwards evaluated the work of this assignment I also realized that I should have used a different approach to the task by to a much larger extent trying to get a broad understanding of the information ecology and to involve the workers in the process of reorganizing the content of the site. I therefore think that a major qualification earned from this case is that I got more knowledge on how to approach similar information architecture projects.

Results

I developed a new detailed sitemap by the use of card sorting partly using a software solution and partly by using post-ITs. The new sitemap structure was accepted by a contact person at Europcar and I made a detailed description of where to put the content from the old Intranet in the new structure. I also made a simple wireframe to show an idea of how the content of the new Intranet could be organised at the main page. The main purpose in doing this was that Dafolo Marketing wanted to get some knowledge on some tools for constructing wireframes.