Design Guidelines for the Department of Communications, Energy and Natural Resources Case Study
Background
The Department of Communications, Marine and Natural Resources (DCMNR) are a long-standing customer of ours. Over the last year, we've conducted usability and accessibility evaluation of the DCMNR intranet and 3 in-house applications. However, one of our more recent tasks has been to re-write a stodgy design document and make it into a hands-on design bible for all DCMNR developers.
Services Rendered
- Accessibility Audit
- Visual Design
- HTML and CSS Template Development
- Information Architecture
- Questionnaire Design and Survey
- Usability Evaluation (Heuristic)
- User profiling and task analysis
- Focus Group
- Wireframe Prototyping
- Accessibility Consulting
Goals
The goal was to create a set of guidelines that were highly prescriptive, flexible easy to follow and supported the creation of usable and accessible Information and Communication Technology. The guidelines were broken down into PDA guidelines, web guidelines, intranet guidelines and web-based application guidelines.
Our Solution
Open Interface took the Departments Common Interface Design Framework (CIDF) document and produced highly detailed guidelines organised along several several themes. The guidelines offered specific and prescriptive instruction to internal and 3rd party developers on accessible and usable interface design.
A Quality Assurance checklist for non-technical staff (including step-by-step test methodologies) was also developed to allow non-technical staff to ensure work is checked against all appropriate guidelines.
This document now forms part of the design framework for all the Departments external websites, intranets, web-based applications and sites for mobile devices such as PDAs.
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