The Additive Manufacturing site is one of ITW's enterprise initiatives. The site provides information and resources to ITW's many businesses on the uses of 3D printing in a manufacturing setting. The site was created several years ago using Sharepoint, and was in need of reorganization and a refresh.

I began by doing a content evaluation, mapping all the pages, articles and images in the current additive manufacturing site. Working with the project managers, we culled the unnecessary pages and old content from the outline.

The remaining content was then readied for a hybrid card sort. Pre-defined categories were given, but participants were able to add their own categories, if they felt the current ones did not accurately reflect the relationship between the cards.

The sort was conducted electronically using Optimal Sort, and sent to project managers and users of the site. The sort was open for one week. The resulting dendrogram and similarity matrix were exported to Excel.

The dendrogram was then used to create a new hierarchy tree, outlining the organization of the new site. After discussing the results and getting approval from the project manager, prototypes for the new pages were created using Balsamiq. Once the project managers had signed off on the new look, the new site was created in Sharepoint, complete with new graphics and updated functionality, thanks to the addition of jQuery elements.