go2HR is BC’s leading employment resource for the service industry. The organisation was first formed to address an urgent need—an impending labour shortage in BC surrounding the Vancouver 2010 Olympics—but their website had since experienced mission-drift. Their purpose and website had both bloated and as a result had lost focus. They came to us with a decade-old website and more than 3,000 pages of content.

Though go2HR self-identified as a “portal,” our experience shows the idea of a portal is out of date and almost entirely ineffective, as it tries to be all things to all people. Domain7 took go2 through a strategy process that not only helped them reprioritise their content and refocus on the right audience, but to rediscover their mission. Here’s a glimpse at how we did it:

First we used the go2HR database to find out what audiences are really looking for—that meant a series of electronic surveys to 100 users in key audience groups across the province: employers, job seekers and employees, in all types of hospitality roles. Next, we did a content inventory and audit to narrow down 20 key content areas. We developed a heuristic with seven analysis criteria: completeness, findability, information scent, relevance, influence, popularity, and voice/style. Then we ranked them in terms of strategic importance—how they met go2HR’s actual business goals.

The result was a giant scorecard that revealed three immediate trouble zones:

1. Job board - This was the site’s most trafficked page, but it was clunky and difficult to use.
2. Articles - go2 had a wealth of useful, well-written content that was buried three levels deep.
3. Programs - Over the years go2 has started offering multiple training programs for hospitality roles, but these offerings weren’t centralized or easy to sort through.

Based on this and real user feedback, we helped go2 re-emerge, not as a “portal” but as an authority. We made the job board central, and built a fantastic user interface. We made articles easy to find and grouped them into relevant categories, and we put training opportunities in one accessible place.

Page tables and digital wireframes helped us establish content priorities and test them on real users. User feedback allowed us refine wayfinding and calls to action, and measure their success in reaching goals. Then we married the wireframes with one of two distinctive styleboards shifting the site from a content-heavy design to one driven by spectacular local photography.

All of this was built on a robust Drupal platform, which included some serious custom scripting to simplify the process of importing go2’s wealth of existing content. We made the site fully responsive for job seekers on the go. The finished product gives go2HR real focus. The site still has a significant volume of content, but it feels small and manageable because it’s so easy to find what you need.