INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE CASE STUDY
BACKGROUND
The Saudi Government commissioned the agency I was working with to redesign their Industrial Clusters website. The program focuses on diversifying the Kingdom's revenue from oil by creating an initial 5 manufacturing Clusters that exploit the country's competitive advantages in raw materials, low cost of energy, labour force, and their geographical location. The clusters were :
1.
Automative
2.
Metals Processing
3.
Plastics & Packaging
4.
Domestic Appliances
5.
Solar Energy
BUSINESS REQUIREMENTS
The "Clusters" were at different stages of development, and the challenge was to provide a content managed infrastructure that allowed individual cluster stakeholders to add more content in the future.
The requirements were that their online presence should :
1.
Create global awareness of the Kingdom's Industrial Strategy and Industrial Clusters programme, specifically amongst foreign and domestic investors who can contribute to the development of the Clusters
2.
Deliver a credible and persuasive case for investment in Saudi Industrial Clusters
3.
Support investors in the process of developing a business case for investment in the Kingdom
4
Facilitate enquiries to Industrial Clusters through the website (contact form e-mail)
APPROACH
The first task was to scope out the existing website to ascertain which content was to be migrated, extract information from brochures supplied, and to identify future content needs.
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A draft infrastructure (in the form of an Excel document) was proposed and together with the Client Services Director, numerous conference calls were made to nail down specific needs for each Cluster.
The requirements gathering formed the bulk of the time I spent on the project and resulted in an extensive scoping out of sitemaps, flows and wireframe modules that were flexible enough to cover off all of the needs of the sectors, while allowing stakeholders to select which modules to use for their specific sector. Since the various "clusters" were at different stages of development, not all of them required all of the content modules.
Working closely with the designer, I recommended that where possible, infographics were used to avoid a content-heavy website and that lifestyle images were used to entice investors. Modules were offered to support evolving content. The journeys and wireframes were designed with an emphasis on user experience and usability for both internal users and external users.
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The website is available in Arabic and English and has since been "reskinned" and some of the content has changed, but the underlying architecture remains.
