STRATEGY REPORT Site: Evry.no. This is a mandatory assignment of IBE 312.

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1 STRATEGY REPORT Site: Evry.no This is a mandatory assignment of IBE 312. Group 1: Erling J. Wollen, Bjørn-Olav Muggerud, Marcus Andreasson, Kai-Henning Leira, Natalie H. Husby and Kirsti Ø. Liabø

2 Innhold 1. Introduction Executive Summary Audiences & Mission/Vision for the Site Lessons Learned from Research meeting, Stakeholder Interviews, Benchmarking, and Heuristic Evaluation Research Meeting... 3 What is the purpose with your site?... 3 Who are the intended audiences?... 3 What is the planned content and functionality?... 3 What is the current content?... 3 What future content or services are planned?... 4 IS there anything you like about your page?... 4 What do you want to change? User Interview Benchmarking Heuristic Evaluation Architectural Strategies & Approaches Blueprints Wireframes... 10

3 Strategy Report Site: Evry.no 1. INTRODUCTION We are hired to help Evry with improving their website; the mission is to make a better website for their audiences. During this process we have used different techniques to reveal the weaknesses and the things that does not work very well. We found many good functions, and some that we would like to suggest changes to. This report is meant to reveal our findings. 2. EXECUTIVE SUMMARY We discovered that the evry.no website is actually quite good, but it needs a little tweaking to be even better. We did some research and came up with a plan to fix the site. Mainly we compressed the content and changed the navigation bars a little. When we started, the site was long and not suited for small screens, so we decided to make everything fit in one screenshot, so that no scrolling would be needed, or at least keep the scrolling to a minimum. Also, we hid one of the tabs on the navigation bar beneath another one, to make the content make more sense. Blueprints were made for both the original site and the new and improved site, and we also made wireframes for the new site. The compressed site is a lot user-friendlier than the old one, and the web shop is now placed on the top rather than on the bottom of the main page, where it is easy to the users to find it. We also compared the evry.no to the site steria.no, who is a competitor to Evry, and Evry came victorious from the technical comparison. In the visual comparison we preferred Steria s layout, and we let it inspire us in our work to improve Evry s site. 3. AUDIENCES & MISSION/VISION FOR THE SITE Mission statement evry.no: As Norway s leasing IT consultant business we bring information to life, creating value for our customers to the benefit of society. Evry s ambition is to give life and a meaning to the information thanks to solutions that create value for our customers. Evry combines indepth knowledge of the industry with an approach to the client. We combine the wide knowledgebase of a large organization, with a local presence to help our customers realize their full potential. The audiences for evry.no: Evry s audiences are all the people that are affected by the technology provided by the company. It includes all the users, owners and developers of the technology within all the industries that Evry operate.

4 4. LESSONS LEARNED FROM RESEARCH MEETING, STAKEHOLDER INTERVIEWS, BENCHMARKING, AND HEURISTIC EVALUATION 4.1. Research Meeting What is the purpose with your site? The purpose with Evry.no is to ensure the users that they get the information that we want to convey and attract new customers. This information consists of online IT-services that Norwegians and Scandinavians make use of every day, without being aware of it. We want to promote and educate the spectators about these services. They include certain applications that have to do with tax, banking and pharmacy to mention a few. We use our knowledge and experience to develop general usable services that creates value and benefit to the society. Who are the intended audiences? The intended audiences are the current customers and the potential new customers. These new customers are both in the private and the public sector. This means both businesses and the standard households. What is the planned content and functionality? The main planned content and functionality is to compress the pages into a single page/frame with no/less scrolling. The idea is to split the content into several menus on the single page, that way you can still view the whole content only by using one frame. All the menus and categories open in the usual way in a new page, but these will also have compressed containment. With this plan, we will increase the user-experience in our opinion. The entire information about our products and services on the site will be easier to access and process. To make this work, we have to adjust the image sizes and decrease the font size. Certain information is scheduled to be edited and reviewed. In addition, we want to present the information of the services and web store to provide easier accessibility for our customers. What is the current content? The current content is mainly about what kind of goods and services we provide, arrangements we are making and are involved in, the latest news within IT, our current career opportunities and areas we are focusing our work on right now. We direct the information towards the future and present, but it is important that our visitors know about the work we have done in the past and how we have gotten where we are right now.

5 What future content or services are planned? Future content and services we have planned are not accurate right now, but we are constantly working on new ideas on how the society can benefit from our solutions. One of our main ideologies is to be the leading supplier of IT services in the Nordic, for that we need a well functional web site that can provide everyone the information that they strive and can make use of. We want to expose ourselves the best way we can. The content about the web store is not that easy to use, therefore we are planning to develop a better way to use and find it, as it can be especially tricky to find. IS there anything you like about your page? Our page is very informative and easy to understand. We think that our visitors can easily understand our purpose and meaning of the services that we provide. We feel that the page connects easily with the user, mainly due to the pleasant blend of white background, blue subtitle and black text. It harmonises with all the content, in a way it is more composed. We also like that our front page does not have any disturbing advertisements or pop-ups. Our website emphasises on design, purity and simplicity. What do you want to change? We want to make the information easier for the user to understand. A few concepts already have description, but we mainly want our site to be more informative while we enhance the user interface. It is the way we want visitors and customers to interact with us as an organization. For that matter, the most important value for us is to promote and market our services. In this meaning, we want to change the web store and make it more visible. The ideology for this is very simple but again crucial: getting the message from us to you User Interview The opinions of users are often one of the most valuable components of webpage research. For the user interviews in this rapport, we found two types of main users. The first was businesses that are looking for information about consulting services, software and events/courses for employees. The second was individual users of the webpage, searching for information about events/courses and career options. The user interview was kept quite simple. There were only two topics we wanted to map out, the purpose of using the site and the suggestion for improvement. The user interviews gave the following results: - Businesses: want to find out if Evry can help them solve a business related problem or develop solutions. It is important for the businesses to find what kind of products/solutions Evry can offer, and which industry they have had experience with. Having a good portfolio is quite important in the consultant industry, and businesses are interested in seeing these.

6 -Individual people: want to find information that is suited for individuals. Events/courses and career options are the most popular/relevant. The users were then asked if they had any suggestions on how the page could be improved from the current version. - Business: when looking for products like software, it would be interesting to see screenshots from the actual application to get an idea of how the UI looks, without having to make an inquiry. - Individuals: the people that are looking for jobs have the opportunity to list all the available jobs, and filter them on location. Some users would like to have the opportunity to have more filters, like filters on the type of job and the main software platform used Benchmarking Benchmarking is making comparative measurements or judgments, involving the systematic identification, evaluation, and comparison of information architecture features of web sites 1 We used competitive benchmarking, using as this is a competing itconsulting/software-supplier. Visual: Steria has a short and easy main page, but it appears more messy with the changing picture / ad. Evry s main page is straightforwardly, and appears clean, but it is too long. It takes many clicks to get to the different chunks of content. Navigation: Steria has nice drop-down menus, and a sidebar that shows some of the width and the depth of the hierarchy. At Evry s site, there is no consistency in having the local sidebar on every page. Throughout the site, Evry has a clean and spacey layout, but this makes the pages long and not very suitable for small computer screens. It takes many clicks manoeuvring from the top of the page to the bottom. Search: Steria uses Google-search, and this gives the known lay out of Google-resultslisting. Evry uses three different methods for search: - Using the search-icon the search is global. - Using the search field appearing under the local sites the search is only local. - One can also search using indexes of customers. Using technical benchmarking at: we found that Steria.no got warnings of: total size, amount of pictures, amount of objects, image size and script size. 1 «Information Architecture for the World Wide Web»

Suggestion: smaller pictures, and less open space, could make the site more orderly and easy to navigate. 4.

7 Technical Benchmarking, Steria.com Evry.no on the other hand, only got warnings of: image size and script size. Technical Benchmarking Evry.no Giving us the impression that the technical part of Evry is not too bad, and is worth working with, and that it is not necessary to redesign/reprogram the site. Suggestion: smaller pictures, and less open space, could make the site more orderly and easy to navigate Heuristic Evaluation Each of our experts reviewed the site, to evaluate what is good and what is bad. The goal is to find out if: - The site provides multiple ways to access the same information - Indexes and sitemaps should be employed to supplement the taxonomy - The navigation system should provide users with a sense of context - The site should consistently use language appropriate for the audience - Searching and browsing should be integrated and reinforce each other. 2 To start with our findings: - The pictures on the main-page are too big, making the page too long to navigate in. This makes it difficult to get at clear impression of what Evry s mission and vision with this page. But on the other hand, all the space between the articles, gives the page a clear and tidy impression. - The Search-results does not give a good result list, and gives different results depending on which page you are on. But there is generally more than one way to get to the same information. - The English global and the Norwegian menu do not have the same options. 2 «Information Architecture for the World Wide Web»

8 - Parts of the global menu disappear as one manoeuvre down. - Each of the customers under the label Customers has their own photo and it is not possible to filter the content. This means that the page becomes long and does not give the users a good overview of customers. Our suggestions will be listed under the next chapter. But the most important finding using Heuristic method is: - Smaller pictures/remove the big picture on the front page. - Remove pictures from customer list or categorize them by industry. - Local menu bars 5. ARCHITECTURAL STRATEGIES & APPROACHES The technical Benchmarking gave us the impression that the technical part of Evry is not too bad, and is worth working with, and that it is not necessary to redesign/reprogram the whole site. However, we have some suggestion to make the site easier to navigate, search and to easier get an overview over what Evry offers. - Smaller pictures, and less open space, could make the site more orderly and easy to navigate. - Smaller pictures/remove the big picture on the front page. - Local menu bars. - More visible web shop. - More categorized list of customers. - Examples of the user interface of applications. - Design improvements. We have now implemented some of these improvements into Blueprints and Wireframes.

5.1. Blueprints Blueprints show the relationships between pages, and are often called site maps. The first blue print is a High-level blueprint, containing all the content on Evry.

Blueprint-1. Evry.no High-level blueprint of the existing webpage Initially, the page was already pretty good when it came to the structure, and we did not see the need for massive improvements.

9 5.1. Blueprints Blueprints show the relationships between pages, and are often called site maps. The first blue print is a High-level blueprint, containing all the content on Evry.no This blueprint is of the existing page, made automatically by Visio. It contains all the elements from the top layer of the site. It also shows two examples of the second layer of the site. Blueprint-1. Evry.no High-level blueprint of the existing webpage Initially, the page was already pretty good when it came to the structure, and we did not see the need for massive improvements. We had mostly design and some smaller structure changes. The structural changes we had for the page was primarily the movement of content within the navigations system, and most changes occurred within the top layer of the architectural hierarchy. Blueprint-2 shows the top layer of evry s existing webpage.

Blueprint-2 Evry.no Low-level blueprint of the top layer of the existing webpage Blueprint-3. Evry.no Low-level blueprint of the new and improved webpage The new blueprint, Blueprint-3, has some small changes compared to the old one.

10 Blueprint-2 Evry.no Low-level blueprint of the top layer of the existing webpage Blueprint-3. Evry.no Low-level blueprint of the new and improved webpage The new blueprint, Blueprint-3, has some small changes compared to the old one. The visibility of the web shop was something the company wanted to change during the research meetings. The web shop has now got it s own label on the global navigation menu, making access and visibility easier. The label customers on the global navigation menu contains a list of all customers. This list is very long, and contains all customers from all industries, making content unorganized and difficult to find. By removing the label from the global navigation menu and placing it under industries, the users can now view customers sorted under each industry. The subsequent level-blueprint shows the next step of the structure of the new blueprint under the label industry. The figure shows how examples of customers are sorted under each of the industries.

11 Blueprint-4. Evry.no Low-level blueprint of subsequent levels under the tab industries on the new webpage 5.2. Wireframes The wireframes provide an architectural perspective on how single pages should look. Wireframe-1. Evry.no Low-level wireframe of the new webpage design Wireframe-1 presents the new architectural design for the top layer of the web page. Wireframe-2 illustrates these new changes in a visual presentation. The wireframes are based on structural changes seen in the blueprints and is supported by the background research.

Wireframe-2. Evry.no High-level wireframe of the new webpage design The research result from the benchmarking showed that steria s navigation menu was better than the one on evry.no. We would like to implement a similar solution to evry.

This is also something that can be seen in Wireframe-1 and Wireframe-2, where you get the different industries displayed in a local menu when clicking on the global navigation bar, instead of being

12 Wireframe-2. Evry.no High-level wireframe of the new webpage design The research result from the benchmarking showed that steria s navigation menu was better than the one on evry.no. We would like to implement a similar solution to evry.no, so that the user does not have to click themselves through so many pages when navigating. This is also something that can be seen in Wireframe-1 and Wireframe-2, where you get the different industries displayed in a local menu when clicking on the global navigation bar, instead of being directed to another page. Wireframe-3. Navigation bar design, steria.no vs. evry.no A suggestion coming from the user interviews was to include an illustration picture of the user interface of the application at the page of the different applications. Here is an example of wireframes for the page SAP-CRM under services/ Business solutions/crm/sap CRM. Firs we see how the page looked before:

interface of the application looked without having to make an inquiry.

13 Wireframe-4. Old SAP CRM page The users wanted to get an overview how the user interface of the application looked without having to make an inquiry. This new wireframe for the page contain the same information, but with an example of a user interface: Wireframe-5. New SAP CRM page

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