ATO Intranet
The challenge
The Australian Taxation Office Intranet contained a large volume of content and users were having extreme difficulty locating the information they needed. With more than 20,000 staff accessing the Intranet every day, this was impacting on organisational efficiency and reducing staff productivity. The ATO is also currently undergoing major organisational change (the ATO Change Program), which is set to alter the face of ATO business. This meant that the Intranet IA had to be robust enough to ensure that users could easily find the information they were looking for, yet flexible enough to retain its integrity despite major organisational restructuring.
The solution
Due to the volume of content being addressed, we took a top-down approach to redesigning the site taxonomy. After conducting in-depth analysis of the Intranet's site statistics and sifting through content categories to identify major themes, we carried out card sorting sessions with representative users, which gave us valuable insight into the different mental models that ATO staff held about the information. From the results of the card sorting sessions, we were able to develop a preliminary draft architecture for the site. We developed this in consultation with business stakeholders from each of the ATO's 15+ business lines. We tested the taxonomy with users by drawing mock-ups of the screens and asking them to show us what they would click on to find certain types of content. We then took an iterative approach and refined the architecture, tested again, refined and tested again to achieve a final product.