NISO: National Information Standards Organization

The National Information Standards Organization (or NISO for short) is a data driven website that acts as a library database for publications of industry standards. NISO houses roughly 2,500 pages, with an average of 275,000 monthly site visitors. When NISO came to Isovera, their project goals included conducting a site migration and redesign, and increasing site functionality.

Making the move
When NISO moved to Drupal, a key goal of the project was to improve site flexibility and user experience. One aspect of this goal included being able to make trickle down changes- changes where making one edit would automatically trigger similar edits to be made throughout the site. Isovera built out capacity for users to do this, which created ease of use and simplified content management and uniformity for site users.
With the move to to Drupal, the team also expanded the capabilities of editors by giving more people access to make structure and content changes easily. By gaining more content editor access, the NISO team is able to more efficiently and quickly manage their content.

Responsive redesign
A crucial element of the NISO project was creating a website that would load and render well on a variety of devices. Isovera built and designed a responsive website that would do just that, with special attention to the site performance on mobile devices. By developing and designing with specific interest to creating mobile device usability, Isovera designed and built a site that allows for strategic line wrapping, well formatted content, and an overall beautiful display.
In addition to a beautiful display, Isovera created a site design that ties NISO’s online personality to their marketing collateral, and is attractive and easy to use for statisticians, board members, non-profits, and other audiences interested in industry standard reports. After researching and conducting focus groups on what users wanted from NISO’s site, the site was redesigned with alterations to color, type, and images. These changes served as a way to portray a more modern look and feel for NISO, making it less utilitarian and more engagingly interactive.

Supplementing search
A large portion of NISO’s website revolves around the need to search and find historical records of industry standards. To increase usability and ease on behalf of site users, Isovera focused on creating improved search functionality. To supplement and build out search functionality, Isovera created tags and taxonomies that segmented, sorted, and categorized the content on NISO’s site. The new taxonomies and tags allowed for content to be searched by topic, publication type, and specification, as well as sorted by content tags.
By doing this, users are now able to search for records more easily, and in more ways than the traditional single search bar. This improves search functionality, and enables site users to find what they are looking for faster and more easily.