ARINC’s user-centered intranet: Doubling user comprehension in just 3 weeks HFI & ARINC present a unique remote card-sorting technique to the 2005 Usability Professionals Association conference

MONTREAL – ARINC is the leading provider of transportation communications and systems engineering solutions for five major industries: aviation, airports, defense, government, and transportation. ARINC is a $636 million company employing 3,000 people in over 100 offices around the world, with headquarters in Maryland, Singapore, and London.

THE CHALLENGE
With such a diverse workforce, ARINC's intranet must serve a wide range of employee needs—all with the same user interface. Historically, the human resource section on their intranet was combined with day-to-day administrative tasks. This overlap often confused users, partly because it didn't reflect ARINC's organizational structure. People came to the site expecting to perform a particular task, but were distracted by other categories or bewildered by the terminology.

HFI'S APPROACH
HFI developed a unique approach to streamline ARINC's intranet: an un-moderated, remote card-sorting technique using PowerPoint®. HFI gathered insight from ARINC employees worldwide by using a simple test that subjects could complete on their own and e-mail back to the design team.
This solution was fast and cost-effective. Forty subjects completed the card-sort exercise in a one-week span. HFI expedited the process by leveraging its global resource team in India, which performed the data analysis in just hours. In addition, no travel costs were incurred.
The result was a new user-centered design, based on the international card-sorting data from ARINC employees in Europe, South America, Asia, and North America. This remote card-sort technique was jointly presented by HFI and ARINC at the 2005 Usability Professionals Association conference in Montreal.

THE BENEFITS
HFI and ARINC successfully reorganized the HR intranet site. ARINC's Human Resource and Administration groups reached a mutual agreement on the new format, based on the solid data gathered during the user-centered design process. Even more importantly, employees around the world accepted the new design, since their usage models were taken into account. In fact, reverse card-sort testing found that 96% of the users understood the new site's categorizations and task groupings, compared with only 45% on the old design. HFI's turnaround time from data gathering to finished design: only three weeks.


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About Human Factors International:
Human Factors International (HFI) helps customers create Web sites, applications, and Intranets that are intuitive and easy to use. Their work is based on the Schaffer-Weinschenk Method™, an ISO-certifiable process for user-centered design. HFI also provides certification for practitioners of usability. Since 1981, they have solved thousands of real-world usability challenges for hundreds of major clients. They’ve worked on more than 2,300 interface projects and taught over 1,400 courses on interface design. HFI headquarters are in Fairfield, IA, with regional offices in Boston, Washington DC, San Francisco, London, New York, Mumbai, Bangalore, and Singapore. To learn more, visit www.humanfactors.com.