[Sigia-l] Finding and Choosing a Consultant

[Peter Van Dijck]

Hi Laura,
of course I haven't talked to you, and this is an assumption, but
there seems to be the idea in your organization that a big, multi-step
relaunch is the best approach to your IA (and other) problems.

I would question that assumption, at least partly. Usually, these IA
problems in really large orgs are reflected in the structure of the
organization and the way decision making is done. No one big relaunch
will fix everything.

I would expect there is some low-hanging fruit to be fixed on the
site, some of that might be big projects in themselves (federated
search perhaps).

And ps: yes, some consultants do usability *and* IA (I do).

Cheers,
Peter
http://petervandijck.net IA consulting

On 2/1/07, Laura Norvig <lauran at etr.org> wrote:
> 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
> ------------
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