Tony Goins
UX Professional / Content Manager

Workforce Site (Proposed)

IA and Wireframes for a cohesive workforce offering

Great offerings, not so easy to find

Problem: Columbus State offers a variety of workforce programs, both for individual workers or for companies to train their employees. But the offerings are a bit random and hard to find.

Solution: Comprehensive information architecture (IA), content inventory and wireframes.

Tools: Content inventory, Axure.

(This is a speculative project I did over the pandemic. The project is just now getting under way.)

Workforce Site (Proposed)

The human milk program is actually really good. It's nationally recognized.

A content model

I had a problem at work, and the next day, I read about it in my grad school textbook. I was looking for a content model.

Our workforce offerings are great, but they can feel a bit random. Most of them were developed through grant programs or in partnership with specific companies, so they don't feel like a cohesive offering. It's hard for a company to predict what we could do for them.

Working with a colleague, I inventoried all of our workforce offerings and the types of things we might offer in the future.

I decided that the basic unit of taxonomy was a "program." Programs break down along several facets:

  • Training programs for individual workers (IT certificates, Formula / Human milk, etc.)

  • Training programs offered to workers at individual companies (Nationwide, Heartland Bank, etc).

  • Ways companies can partner with us (internships, job fairs, etc.)

  • Programs aimed at specific industries.

  • General business consulting (this can be practically anything, from Six Sigma to Spanish for Healthcare).

My content model shows this from the program view (bottom up) or from the industry-company-worker view (top down).

Against brochureware

As a large legacy institution, CState's instinct is to create web pages for our offerings - in the manner of a print brochure.

I advocate for content that is database-driven, served up dynamically, and immediately actionable to the user.

Prototype - Axure

With my content model in place, the next step was to mock up a prototype. The taxonomy allows you to browse programs for companies or for individual workers, but also includes information on key industries.

From the bottom up, this prototype assumes a database of programs that can be sorted and filtered.