Project Overview

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Introduction

The Civil Rights Litigation Clearinghouse, developed by the University of Michigan Law School, is a valuable repository of documents and case information from thousands of large civil rights cases. The primary focus of this project is to improve the usability of the "Issues" category, a key data point about cases, for both administrators handling the back end of the data and public users viewing the front end of the data.

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Challenge

The existing interface of the "Issues" section of the Clearinghouse website presents a usability challenge. Administrators tagging case-related data and public users searching by these tags need to navigate through dozens of options, which is not user-friendly. In addition, the section's current organization appears disorganized, which exacerbates the problem for users attempting to locate relevant cases or documents. The challenge is to structure and present the "Issues" section to both front-end and back-end users in an easier and more effective way.

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Goal

The goal of this project was to improve the user experience of the Clearinghouse website by improving the "Issues" interface. This included not only reorganizing and restructuring the "Issues" section to make it more intuitive and user-friendly, but also coming up with creative solutions to present items in the "Issues" category - possibly through drop-down menus or searchable lists with subheadings.

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01. Interaction Map

Process

1. Each member individually searched the site.
2. Group discussion of how different people identified by the project proposal might use the site.
3. Conducted a collective search to determine issues and point to key findings we individually discovered.
4. Listed priorities based on the initial requests from the client.

Key Issues

• The issues part is not obvious enough for viewers to find.
• There are many "issues" from which a searcher could select but cannot view them without clicking the MORE button.
• Viewers cannot see which cases reflect the "issues" they selected.
• Our team could not determine if the searches were inclusive or exclusive based on the search parameters given.
• Case information is repeated in various spaces on the respective information pages.
• Users cannot determine what information is hyperlinked.
• When users click "resources" they are ultimately led back to the search page.
• New users will be redirected to the create a new account page when saving a case, but when the account is created it will not return to the previous case page, and clicking on the home page does not resolve the issue.

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02. User Interview

In order to gain a comprehensive understanding of the user base of the Clearinghouse website, we conducted interviews with four different individuals, including current and potential users. These interviewees represented our primary user groups: law students, practicing attorneys, and back-end administrators. Given their diverse experiences and interactions with the site, we used these individuals as our primary source of insight.

In addition to simply determining task completion, we sought to understand how the current "Issue" search system helps or hinders users and how they generally spend their time on the site.

Findings on Law Students

1. New users were frustrated by the learning curve and the lack of an intuitive search system.
2. Would like a more intuitive layout that includes a timeline with hyperlinks to relevant documents and a suggested case tab to better understand the context and depth of research.

Findings on Legal Professionals

1. Difficulty understanding the relationship of appeals in the cases searched, leading to distractions in their research.
2. Better organization of information is needed, such as a folder system for saving and editing cases, and clearer presentation of individual case information.

Findings on Back-End Administrators

1. Difficulty in finding assigned cases and completing tasks due to an unintuitive system
2. Problems with needing to open multiple tabs to edit and add documents and information led to a cluttered and cumbersome work environment.

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Persona

We then developed personas based on this data to help make tailored recommendations to improve the overall user experience for the site.

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03. Survey

Our team developed a comprehensive survey for the Clearinghouse website to assess user satisfaction and identify areas for enhancement. While we have not formally deployed this survey, its structure is based on stakeholder interviews and pilot testing designed to capture both the functional and aesthetic aspects of the user experience. While the current sampling methodology may introduce some bias, insights from the survey could prove invaluable to the Clearinghouse in understanding user interactions, particularly regarding the functionality of the search bar.

In addition, the survey allows users to express their concerns, providing the organization with direct feedback on what users enjoy or struggle with, thereby guiding the modification or removal of particular features. Despite its limitations, the survey has the potential to highlight and quantitatively corroborate the issues raised in our previous interviews, thus giving a road map for enhancing the clearinghouse website's usability and overall user experience.

View full survey questions

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04. Comparative Evaluation

Comparative analysis provides a path toward understanding the similarities, differences, strengths, and weaknesses of a product by analyzing the offerings and functionality of its competitors. Through analysis, we can discover the ecology of the digital legal research environment and compare our client's product with its competitors.

We began our competitor search during the interview phase of our user research by asking stakeholders which websites they visit for legal research. Using their responses, we developed a feature and element matrix for the Civil Rights Litigation Clearinghouse, which allowed us to identify its direct, indirect, partial, and analogous competitors. Alongside usability testing, this research will be used to formulate recommendations for a better user experience.

We then created a matrix with 7 different elements and features to compare the similarities and differences among these products and Clearinghouse.

We further developed a 2x2 space analysis, in which we summarized the results from the matrix research into 2 axes and compared those aspects among comparative products. One aspect is searching usability, which is determined by the ability of allowing broad and narrow searches, simplicity for users to understand how to conduct a search, elements of look and layouts, and reliability, which is calculated by the visibility of the search results number and relevance of searchable keywords and results that relate to whether users can trust the website’s search function.

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05. Heuristic Evaluation

By conducting a heuristic evaluation based on Jakob Nielsen's 10 general principles of interaction design, the team was able to delve deeper into the issues of the current website.

Severity Rating Scale

Group Evaluation Results

View full group evaluation results and individual results

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06. Usability Testing

Our team conducted six usability tests to identify usability issues with the Clearinghouse website. These tests focused on the front-end and back-end of the site and were designed with user characteristics and specific tasks in mind. Based on our analysis, we made recommendations for improvements to enhance the user experience.

For the tests, we used an introductory preamble, a pre-test questionnaire, tasks, short interviews, and a post-test questionnaire. These tasks were designed to simulate typical scenarios that users might encounter. Each test was conducted through Zoom, and data was collected by a designated recorder.

Pre-Test Questionnaire Results

Post-Test Questionnaire Results

Task Performance Data

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07. Final Results

Front-End Findings

Issue 1: Too many Search Sections & too much information in the search bar

• The Issues tab is difficult to find, and many users choose to use the "Search text" tab.
• The separation between the search sections is indistinguishable.
• Texts and titles are too small to read through easily.

Recommendation: Adopt a minimalist design aesthetic to the search bar

• Separate categories in the way users think of a case.
• Collapse separated sections into sections encapsulating similar information.
• Put the "Issues" section at the top.

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Issue 2: The search logic in the Issues section is unclear

• The "More" option below the Issue section is not easily noticed. -- Users are unaware that more specific search options exist beyond the general selection.
• A partial overlap exists between the general and "More" options, but some options are unique to each section -- This confuses users and causes them to repeatedly try and fail in different search areas.

Recommendation: Declutter search bar functions to streamline the search process

• Reassemble the selected general options in the issues section.
• Users may not need prompted categories to search for a case.

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Issue 3: Interaction guidance and representation are not clear

• Tags and keywords chosen by users in the search bar do not show as selected.
• Some tags in the case detail pages are actually hyperlinks, but they are not styled to indicate their functions.

Recommendation: Redesign representation

• Display selected keyword tags at the top of the search bar and case -- This will reaffirm the user's trust in the search results.
• Add a line under clickable links -- When a user clicks on the link the color will change to blue.

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Back-End Findings

Issue 1: The order and layout of the issue-selecting section do not allow users to work quickly

• General issue tags and more specific issue tags are interleaving, rather than from board to details following users’ mental model.
• The issue section features a long one-column list, where users need to scroll to view the list, making issue tags difficult to find.

Recommendation: Reorganize the issues tags and sections

• List general issue tags first and more specific tags after.
• Place popularly used tags at the top for users to find.
• Place different tag sections into a 2 to 4 column layout.

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Issue 2: Unclear Assignments

• Finding the cases assigned to back-end users is unintuitive, and having to use the search box to select their assigned cases was cumbersome.

Recommendation: Add a "To Do" or "My Cases" tab

• A "To Do" or "My Cases" tab separates an individual's work and workspaces.
• Back-end users will no longer have to search for their cases individually.