Special Programme for Research and Training in Tropical Diseases (TDR)
TDR, a special programme based at the World Health Organization required a new corporate web site to reflect the organisation’s new 10-year strategy. Usability, content structure and how the site is maintained by TDR was key to this redesign.
TDR is...
... The Special Programme for Research and Training in Tropical Diseases. It is a global programme of scientific collaboration established in 1975, sponsored by the United Nations Children's Fund, United Nations Development Programme, World Bank and World Health Organization (WHO), and executed by WHO in Geneva, Switzerland.
TDR's focus is on working with institutions in low and middle income countries on research into neglected diseases of the poor, with the goal of improving existing approaches and developing new ways to prevent, diagnose, treat and control these diseases.
Background
TDR is an important organisation within the international health field that required a web site to reflect their new strategic direction and better promote their activities. Over several years TDR's web site had outgrown its structure and was no longer appropriate to deliver TDR's core business to their audiences. There were several challenges and issues with the existing setup:
- The site was maintained in Microsoft® FrontPage so only skilled users in this software could maintain the site – this created a bottleneck and workflow issues
- Additional content was being squeezed into the existing structure (information architecture) and the site had become disorganised in several areas and was difficult to update - as a result the site suffered from usability issues
- The design was outdated and did not utilise the larger screen space available on most computers
- Presentation of content - voice, tone and style - was inconsistent
Our involvement
We joined the project team with scoping already underway and we were initially tasked to evaluate the draft information architecture and to conduct usability testing.
Impressed with our work and proposed new structure for the site, we were asked to help TDR manage the implementation of the new web site. Specifically, our work involved:
- Project management – liaising with team members based in the US and Switzerland
- Information architecture and wireframing
- Scoping functionality and user interaction
- Design
- Content modelling, production and migration
- Implementation of Content Management System
- Usability testing
- Training and support
Our role within this project was varied and we continue to advise TDR on a consultative basis developing ideas for new features on the site and supporting their communications team.
Points of interest
Information architecture
Communicating a new strategy is extremely important to an organisation that is altering how it operates. However, this has to be balanced with the interests of the audience and their drivers for visiting the web site. Therefore, it was important to pull out and raise the profile of content that the different visitors to the site may want from the wealth of information available to them.
Creating a content architecture suitable for a site of this size is often a challenge. In this case, we invested valuable time gaining a thorough understanding of TDR’s operations, new strategy and internal structure and operations. We also utilised our knowledge and expertise of international health and TDR’s audiences to devise an appropriate and flexible architecture that catered for current and future activities.
Support and training
We act as the first line of support to their Communications web team and have run several courses at their offices in Geneva teaching staff members how to maintain and create content on their web site using the CMS.
Templates and content modelling
Templates were designed to facilitate the transfer of content into the CMS. To create these templates we modelled the different types of content (publications, news, events etc) and clearly defined the metadata for each. This ensured the different content types were displayed consistently across the web site.
What’s next?
Looking ahead, we’re very excited to continue supporting and enhancing the functionality of TDR’s web site. One of our future challenges is to enhance how their extensive image library functions.
