Portal Best Practices

Joe Lamantia contributed a very interesting paper on the subject at the IA
Summit this year. You can see his slideshow here:

<http://www.slideshare.net/moJoe/effective-ia-portals-2-slideshare-short>

On Wed, May 28, 2008 at 4:40 PM, Catriona Lohan-Conway <clohanconway at mac.com>
wrote:

> Does anyone have any good insights to share on Portal Development and Best
> Practices?
>
>
Tim Ostler
London

Hi, what kind of portal are you building? Corporate intranet or
extranet (partners site)?

I have been involved with the interaction and user interface design
for both. Here are general rules to follow:

1. Ask about the platform. Is it out of the box (Sharepoint,
Websphere Portal)? Or is it custom from the ground up? There are
implications with flexibility for functionality, features and design
(the later being the most flexible).

2. Be diligent with user research. Ask your users about expectations
and skill level. If you design a portal that is hard to update for
content administrators (stale content) and doesn't engage user with
either meaningful content or productive tools people won't use it.

3. Make sure the portal design also includes support for 508b
compliance, a help section and a feedback mechanism. Nice to have: a
community like functionality, builds involvement.

Cheers I hope this helps, Peter

.................................................
Peter Chung
Senior User Experience Designer
Customer Experience Group, CNET.com

contenthouse at yahoo.com
.................................................

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Posted from the new ixda.org
http://www.ixda.org/discuss?post=29565