The+Organization

Organizational Setting
The Institute of Culture Communication Information Technology offers interdisciplinary education in traditional and new media, communications and digital management. The program aims to prepare students to become the next leaders and innovators of the digital economy. ICCIT collaborates with Sheridan Institute of Technology for an applied learning in design and technology. ICCIT has faculty and instructors from both Sheridan and UTM. There are five faculty and six instructors from UTM (excluding cognate faculty) and seven instructors at Sheridan.

Main User Groups
Currently, the users of the ICCIT are mainly CCIT undergraduate students, but they also include the many faculty, alumni and prospective students for the faculty. However, one of their goals for the new design of this website is to expand their user base to include more faculty and staff (for instance administrative representatives), as well as students from similar programs (such as Sheridan students). In light of this, our design must rely on the participation of these many users to ensure a final product which serves their diverse needs. The users that have been identified are the main stakeholders which will be affected by this change. In addition to this, external stakeholders such as Sheridan College or other faculties who indirectly interact with the site will be impacted as well. Our full list of stakeholders for the prototype development is: · Current CCIT students · Future CCIT students · Alumni · Faculty members and staff · Website administrator (the entity responsible for site maintenance) · Partners such as Sheridan

Design Approach
The major problem which contributed to the frustrations of the current ICCIT website is that, although it was a fully functioning and visually unique design, it did not capture and fulfill the needs of its users. It was designed in an artistic way, but did not consider navigation, organization, or exploration of content. A design approach that better captured the needs of its users, and focused on more than just the usability and visual aesthetics of a website was needed. Since this project contained such a diverse user group whose needs were not being adequately met through current design strategies, a participatory approach was well suited for this project. To achieve this design approach we focused on the users that we involved in our usability sessions and the type of involvement we elicit. Since a department website is visited by a large variety of users, we attempted to gain participation from many of these varying user groups. This involvement ensured that our design did not focus exclusively on the interpretations of the ICCIT committee representatives who have already voiced their many concerns with the current website and who do not represent the entire user group. Also, since the already identified problems with the website included aspects involving the information, organization and overall design, we held usability sessions to gain user perspectives on each of these elements.

Methodology
To achieve a solution to the design problem identified above we selected to adopt a participatory approach, and applied that to various design phases that would take place within this project. We wanted to select diverse types of design activities for our users to participate in order to elicit varying results that could be applied to different aspects of the design. The five design phases which were conducted are described here to form the methodology of our design project. Our design process was inspired by the Participatory Project Timeline described by Bødker, Grønbaek, & Kyng (1993). The timeline is consisted of interviews, future workshop, organizational games and embodying ideas (Bødker, Grønbaek, & Kyng, 1993).

To start the project, our first phase consisted of information gathering of the current project setting. This included information on the users, the goals of the project and the current CCIT website. To do this we held a meeting with CCIT committee members to discuss the project and both the current and envisioned future websites. This phase also included the analysis that we personally conducted on the current website and comparable academic websites.

Once a basis for the project goals and direction was identified we facilitated a brainstorming session in the form of a future workshop for phase two of this project. This session concentrated on identifying features and content that the users hoped to see in the new website design. It also gave structure to the many ideas that the users had. From the information gathered from the future workshop, we were able to assemble a list of major content and features for the new system. With this we held two activities in phase three: low-fidelity prototyping and card sorting. The low-fidelity prototyping allowed users to structure the content/features they wished to see on the home page and design a layout that was usable and functional for them. The card sorting allowed the users to group the various content/features into groups to create a navigational structure for the menus in the home page.

Phase three provided rich information on the layout and content that the users envisioned for the home page of the website. It was sufficient for us to proceed and create wireframe prototypes for the design of the website for phase four. Here were presented the wireframes to the users and used scenarios to test their effectiveness.

The feedback provided from these sessions was utilized in the revisions of these first wireframe prototypes to create a second iteration to present again to users in phase five of this project. This second iteration of prototypes was the conclusion of this design project, however further iterations may be needed to create the optimal website design.

These five design phases demonstrate the variability in our approach taken to create a new design for the CCIT website, and each provided us with useful information going forward in the process.