Discovery
I was tasked with a redesign of the American Bar Association (ABA) website’s search functionality. Speaking with the product team on behalf of the site’s users, I discovered that the search feature at the time had an outdated user experience and user interface. Also, the search results were often not relevant to the site’s users. In further talks with stakeholders at the ABA, including an executive, product owner, and business analyst, I found out that a more robust filtering capability was desired by users. This included an ability to search by ABA Committee. A cleaner interface was also on their wish list, focusing on just the relevant information.
Design
As a result of the discovery phase findings I designed a solution that had filters, or facets, on the left side of the screen. Also, I removed the existing spelled-out URLs from each result, instead indicating the source of the search result (for example "News", "Events", etc.). These changes helped reduce clutter on the page, and facilitated the efficient zeroing in on the data the lawyers wanted. I discovered earlier that users wanted to know how fresh or stale each search result was; this served as a partial proxy to search result relevance. As a result I included the date for each result, along with an option to filer on date.
Evaluation and Implementation
I later got to perform a remote usability test with five lawyers who have used the ABA site on a semi-frequent basis. An interactive mockup in Axure was made specifically for the usability test. Indeed, the robustness of the mockup allowed the participants to walk through several scenarios. I received some great feedback that was instrumental to improving the usability of the feature. For instance, the search page was lauded as being highly readable but criticized for lacking visual spice. This bit of feedback was given to the site’s visual designer for improvement. Moreover, the expand/collapse feature for the left-hand facet was well-received, providing some confirmation that the feature should stay in the final product. I then presented the findings to the Digital Manager at the ABA, along with suggestions for tweaking the design. The development team then implemented the design. I walked them through the design and checked to see if the implementation reflected my interactive mockup.
