Engineering Te Ara
One of the biggest lessons web designers learnt from the bursting of the Dotcom Bubble in 2001, was that if an organisation is to benefit from going online, its site has to be more than fluff, smoke and mirrors. Users and potential users of a site have to be able to use it easily and not be turned away by unnecessarily complicated or time-consuming demands. For the creators of Te Ara, it was a lesson they took to heart.
Te Ara, Encyclopedia of New Zealand
Te Ara is the new official encyclopedia of New Zealand. The previous national encyclopedia was published in 1966. Instead of printing volumes of hardcopy, the Government’s Ministry of Culture and Heritage (MCH), is publishing the work online – the first time any country has created an official national encyclopedia in this way.
The 1966 encyclopedia was a large work – together, its three volumes weigh as much as a small child – even so, it is dwarfed by the new edition. Te Ara will contain over two million words of text and more than 20,000 images, recordings and movie clips. The challenges of creating such a massive work are legion. A massive amount of content has to be researched, written and edited; images, both still and moving, have to be sourced, credited and manipulated and then slotted into place. The technology used to create and operate the site has to be stable and able to cope with ever-growing volumes of content and link with a constellation of other sites in New Zealand and offshore.
But of all the issues the MCH and its technical partners had to consider when designing the site, the issue of usability dominated. To succeed, the site had to be usable and useful for a wide range of users. To ensure this came about, Te Ara’s design process was user-centred from the very beginning.
Even before the formal design process began, project leader Dr Jock Phillips spent a lot time looking at websites, figuring out what worked and what didn’t. Dr Phillips, a historian, had previously developed displays for Te Papa – the Museum of New Zealand, and had a keen understanding of the need to present information in a clear and engaging way.
To create Te Ara, the MCH partnered with Wellington web design company Shift and Wellington software company Optimation. Shift developed the “look and feel” of the site – the front-end graphics and user interfaces – while Optimation developed the invisible infrastructure that underpins and drives it.
The team put a lot of early effort into identifying, then understanding, who would use the site. While it was recognised that a very diverse group of users would find their way to the site, particular attention was paid to students as it was felt that not only would the site be used as a teaching and learning resource, but by pitching the site to students, the needs of the wider user group would be well served as well. (In focusing on students, the development team had selected a demanding audience. Students, because of their familiarity with computers, particularly gaming, expect systems to be fast, intuitive, predictable and adaptive – in other words systems that are consistent with their other computing experiences.)
A great deal of effort was put into getting into the heads of students and figuring out what made them tick, so designers could base their decisions on what they knew, rather than on what they assumed. Questionnaires were used for a simple Task Analysis .