Beth MacIntosh

This is a mockup of a redesign and architected smartphone user guide. I conducted card sorts with external (outside the company) beta testers to help understand how our customers think of our products and how they would group and label information. From my research in to users' top issues, I identified user priorities as well, and then crafted an architecture that reflected all of this research so that users could both identify information they were looking for, and find it within the architecture quickly and easily.

Part of information architecture is figuring out to accomplish how you want to organize content in the best way possible for both the customer and the content creators. Because we worked in an XML-based Content Management System, I wanted to ensure that the categories that would appear to organize content in the smartphone Help app, would be easily replicated, and localized (translated) in the system. Using tags like conkeyref, and a file type like keydef, as outlined in this presentation, allowed the team to create categories for their topics (articles) that were easily translated from the system, repeatable as more content was added, and most important of all, made change management much easier and faster when a change to a category was needed across thousands of instances.
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We created an in-house system (called BBHelp) that managed and hosted the content that we presented through our native Help app on the BB10 smartphone OS. This system was fairly complex, and created a steep learning curve for our writers and editors that were creating content for this new environment. To help them understand the how the backend of the system affected what they did, including what metadata they put in to their topics (articles), I created this presentation to explain and illustrate the information they needed to complete their work, and some typical scenarios they might encounter to help them internalize and truly understand the information.
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