[Sigia-l] Finding and Choosing a Consultant

[Laura Norvig]

Our organization is planning a major website re-design (and we 
desperately need it) which will also involve a few iterations of 
usability studies.

Senior management initially tried to task our in-house team with 
designing the usability study, but we are about to vehemently argue 
that this is not realistic, nor will it yield the best results. Part 
of me is thinking that we need not just a usability tester, but an IA 
to oversee the entire redesign project.

Our internal team has great instincts for IA (though you wouldn't 
know it by viewing our website, which has grown haphazardly and has 
been subject to many uncontrollable external pressures), but I know 
from my dabblings into the blogs, books, and postings here of 
professional IAs, that we could really benefit from a professional 
project manager - at least to interpret the results of user testing 
and get on track with an initial re-design.

So here, finally, is my question. How do I go about gathering 
information for senior management on the wide range of costs we could 
be facing? I know individuals here cannot post their own fee 
structures, but perhaps you could anser the following
-where do we begin looking for consultants?
-do some consultants do both IA and usability testing design?
-how do we go about getting quotes (or better yet just ballpark 
figures without taking the time to get quotes)?
-what existing literature on finding and choosing IAs/usability study 
folks do you recommend?

Here is our URL, just to give you a sense of the size of the project
http://nationalserviceresources.org


(In case any of you are wondering who I am, I was an avid reader of 
this list for many years starting at the beginning of this decade but 
I had to change my settings to nomail because so much of my business 
life is consumed by email already. I am a librarian with a passion 
for quality IA and quality search.)
-- 
Laura Norvig, MLIS
"Intelligent Human Agent"
lauran at etr.org