Canadian Citizenship and Immigration

Internet Information Architecture

Challenge: CIC, while planning a redesign of its departmental Web site to more closely align with the needs of CIC’s clients and to better integrate related sites under CIC’s purview, contracted Systemscope to complete a User Needs Analysis and to develop an information architecture for the site. The project involved extensive discovery and analysis work, including consultations with internal stakeholders, a visit to CIC’s Call Centre, content analysis of the existing site, comparative analysis of similar sites, and review of site statistics and search logs.

Approach: Systemscope’s approach to information architecture is to seek the point of intersection between context (mandates, desired outcomes, available resources, technological enablers, governance), content (nature, structure, purpose, lifecycle, processes) and clients (who they are, their motivations for using the site, their mental models of the subject domain, and the behaviours they exhibit when seeking information). With CIC, as with other similar projects, Systemscope helped the department to build a research foundation for web redesign, while identifying gaps in the available research and providing guidance on improving and clarifying the department’s approach to managing the Web as both a communications and a service delivery platform.

Outcome: The deliverables for this project included an IA Research Summary report that communicated these findings, and a set of wireframes documenting alternative proposed architectures for the site. Feedback from key points of service (international visa offices and the Canadian call centre) was solicited, and two final draft architectures were delivered, one using a goal/task-based approach, and the other a “client journey” approach. Both architectures feature approaches to categorization, navigation and page structure that are driven by the research findings.