Website functionality ideas

After conducting my usability review of other sites with similar topics (i.e. Mentoring Australia and Australia Women's Mentoring Network) and with a visual style I admire (i.e. Leriot) I've found that information architecture is one of the most important things to get right at the start. So many of the problems that I identified with the sites were caused by ill-informed information architecture. So, I have thought about how I can manage this and decided that a card sort task using three people that know little about mentoring would be useful. This requires me to get together a list of the elements of the site - the things I want to include on it. This is the list of 'elements' that I would start with - the site would hopefully grow in the future as more people got involved and user's demands increased.

Basic information:

• what is mentoring?
• list of research articles showing the effect of mentoring on job performance/satisfaction/pay, etc.
• guidelines for mentoring
• suggested policies and procedures
• what makes a good mentor
• description of this site, its aims and objectives (though make this short - minimise happy talk! [Krug, 2006])
• documents to help with mentoring process (e.g. GROW [goals, reality, obstacles, wrap up] model of coaching)
• contact us

Interactive elements

• registration for mentor/mentee matching (use recommendations and insights gained through usability testing here)
• notice board to discuss general interest topics, post advertisements, etc.

Originally I had considered having a very interactive site where participants could communicate with their partner in real time. I have since reconsidered this after reading Krug and talking with users about registration and use of such sites. I think that the process would be better facilitated by having the chat through email - it could possibly even be like dating sites where you communicate through email but the site doesn't let each person know the actual email address it's going to. I'm not sure that confidentiality like that would be SO necessary but would like to offer users the possibility.

The next step is to discuss with users how they see the groupings.