An evaluation and assessment for the International Network to Promote the Rule of Law (INPROL) website
SKILLS: Heuristic evaluation, Interviewing, Usability testing, Competitive Analysis
This was a "Needs and Usability Assessment" course project, where we worked with a third-party client, the International Network to Promote the Rule of Law (INPROL), and evaluated the user experience of their website.
INPROL is a global, online community of practice, comprised of some 2,500 rule of law practitioners from 120 countries and 400 organizations. Members come from a range of disciplines and backgrounds to work on rule of law reform in post-conflict and developing countries.
The purpose of our research was to learn about INPROL’s existing and prospective users, their
needs and goals so we can provide useful recommendations for INPROL team to improve the
user experience of the website.
To confirm user needs and validation of the developed product, we completed the following:
We had the following goals in mind when preparing for the usability assessment:
We identified a total of six tasks, three easy-to-medium tasks, two medium-to-difficult tasks, and one difficult task for each member and non-member participant. Usability test was then conducted with eight different users (7 non-members + 1 member).
Usability testing proved to be a particularly valuable method of gaining insight into user experience as and when it is happening, instead of relying purely on users’ self-reported thoughts on the same. In general, we chose usability testing to identify the navigation patterns and user logic guiding the interactions with the website’s key touchpoints.
For each task, we implemented a quantitative measurement to determine the user satisfaction and learnability of the website. The number of positive and negative comments reflect how engaged the users were and based on their recorded statements, we were able to identify if the work flow of the task was thorough and straightforward to complete.
We conducted non-directed, in-depth interviews with 1 INPROL staff member, 1 international legal expert, and 4 INPROL members for a total of 6 interviews. In general, the interviews helped reveal some rich detail about the user experiences of existing members, as well as prospective members. Furthermore, the interviews helped reveal salient use case scenarios as well as underlying usability issues with INPROL’s website.
Three broad themes emerged after we completed the heuristic evaluation, the usability tests,
and the in-depth interviews. These are presented below:
Finally, after analyzing the results of heuristic evaluation, usability tests, and the interviews, we provided a set of recommendations for INPROL team to improve the user experience of the website.
Marjan Ghahremani