Wiederholt & Rickert Partners, LLC (DBA WARP3Insights) was retained by Thoughtmill, Inc., which had recently been acquired by American Systems Corporation, a Washington, D.C.-based technology consulting firm whose clientèle are primarily U.S. Government Agencies, some which cannot be mentioned. In other words, they do a lot of top secret work. This made for an interesting engagement, since we could only see content which did not require a security clearance. We were retained due to the fact that Thoughtmill, whose clientèle are primarily corporations, needed a second opinion from experts approved by ASC.
The Project:
This is very difficult project to describe. I will attempt to be a brief as possible. The project consisted of several main components:
- Competitive Landscape Analysis
Reviewing the other important players in the Washington technology consulting arena and making recommendations to make the ASC website better than the rest. Better for this type of site is not what is typically written about in usability articles and textbooks. Here, better refers to a higher likelihood of being scored higher than the competitors by Government procurement officers. Our task boiled down to ascertaining how quality and value are assessed by reviewing carefully what the successful competitors are doing on their websites and, more importantly, distilling our discoveries into actionable insights for design and organization of content. Don's and Brad's prior experience working with Government contractors (sometimes called "Beltway Bandits") and knowing a lot of people in the business was quite valuable for this part of the consulting engagement.
- Navigation, Information Architecture & Terminology
This component was all about coming up with the right terminology and categorization (navigational hierarchy) for the website. Firms that do business with Federal agencies have a completely different jargon than those working with corporations. There are enough acronyms to make the heads of the faint of heart spin. We also helped to design a really nice site map that made it easy for the target audience to find all of the right buzz words.
A major goal was for the ASC website to be appealing to its users. To reiterate, these users are primarily Federal agency procurement officers. Please trust me when I tell you that what is appealing to a procurement officer is not necessarily the same as the average person. There was a notion within our client organization that lots of Flash/Shockwave would spice up what is, by any standards, really dry material. Our advice was to be sparing in its use unless there was usability information value in its use.
We performed what was requested of us pretty well and the site is up and running, helping ASC to win contracts, and so forth. The use of Flash is still a bit gratuitous but not too far over the line of good taste. Check out the site for yourselves, but don't even try to understand what they are talking about. That is, of course, unless you are an agency procurement officer.