ARINC's user-centered intranet: Doubling user-comprehension in just 3 weeks Background ARINC is the leading provider of transportation communications and systems engineering solutions for five major industries: aviation, airports, defense, government, and transportation. ARINC is a $636 million company employing 3,000 people in over 100 offices around the world, with headquarters in Maryland, Singapore, and London. The challenge With such a diverse workforce, ARINC's intranet must serve a wide range of employee needs – all with the same user interface. Historically, the human resource section on their intranet was combined with day-to-day administrative tasks. This overlap often confused users, partly because it didn't reflect ARINC's organizational structure. People came to the site expecting to perform a particular task, but were distracted by other categories or bewildered by the terminology. HFI's approach HFI developed a unique approach to streamline ARINC's intranet: an unmoderated, remote card-sorting technique using PowerPoint®. HFI gathered insight from ARINC employees worldwide by using a simple test that subjects could complete on their own and e-mail back to the design team. This solution was fast and cost-effective. Forty subjects completed the card-sort exercise in a one-week span. HFI expedited the process by leveraging its global resource team in India, which performed the data analysis in just hours. In addition, no travel costs were incurred. The result was a new user-centered design, based on the international card-sorting data from ARINC employees in Europe, South America, Asia, and North America. The benefits HFI and ARINC successfully reorganized the HR intranet site. ARINC's Human Resource and Administration groups reached a mutual agreement on the new format, based on the solid data gathered during the user-centered design process. Even more importantly, employees around the world accepted the new design, since their usage models were taken into account. In fact, reverse card-sort testing found that 96% of the users understood the new site's categorizations and task groupings, compared with only 45% on the old design. HFI's turnaround time from data gathering to finished design: only three weeks. Find out how HFI can improve your Web site or application. Contact hfi@humanfactors.com or call 1-800-242-4480 “Before HFI helped us redesign our intranet, ARINC's employees had trouble finding what they were looking for. People had to navigate through department subsites that each looked very different from one another.” “The results of the usability tests and card sorts have given us an Intranet which is much more cohesive and userfriendly. HFI also taught our Web team how to use these great new methods to create future Intranet pages on our own.” Carol Bowman - Intranet Webmaster, ARINC