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MIT Press:
CogNet Information Architecture Design
MIT Press, the publishing arm of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, offers CogNet, an online community of scholarly research in the cognitive and brain sciences. CogNet incorporates a range of services for its constituency: news postings, discussion forums, conference listings, a jobs bank, seminar listings, and other tools. At its core is a large repository of specialized books and journals published by MIT Press, which supports a rich and productive cognitive science community worldwide.
The Challenge: Create an active community site for scholars
MIT Press asked us to analyze the existing CogNet site and make recommendations for improving the site’s community features. We drew up a plan that included studying the current site’s goals, features, and functionality, conducting user interviews, and studying successful online communities.
Our Solution: Create a new information architecture that encourages the flow of information across sub-disciplines
Many of the features that we proposed came from a week of intensive user and stakeholder interviews. We analyzed these for common concerns, specific areas of frustration, and creative ideas. Early on we realized the need to more tightly integrate the community features with the core publications and to organize content by sub-discipline. We developed a high-level structure for the expanded site and specific scenarios for content navigation and cross-linking. Our final report and planning diagrams gave MIT Press a complete vision for an expanded and improved Web site.
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