BACKGROUND<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n The State Legislative Search Front End<\/em> is an initiative to create a visual interface for Amazon\u2019s Web Service (AWS) Marketplace to showcase a product that had previously been based in millions of individual XML files. The State Legislative Data Project <\/em>scrapes all 50 states\u2019 and the District of Columbia\u2019s legislative websites and transforms their diverse formats into a common, proprietary XML to facilitate cross-state searches and analytics. Having assisted in the creation of the information architecture of the project since its inception, I was very familiar with the content set and its workflows. However, in its current form, the data had no way of allowing potential customers to see its potential (literally).<\/p>\n\n\n\n RESEARCH<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n For this dual role as both Information Architect and User Experience Designer, I created a research plan, conducted interviews and testing, created design assets and collaborated with a cross-disciplinary team of software developers, Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) and Data Engineers. My in person interviews with SMEs and users revealed the need for faceted search functionality and the desire for \u2018Saved Search\u2019 with the ability to be notified when there was a change in their saved result set. This helped me to expand my competitive analysis to not just direct competitors, but also indirect competitors who exhibited best practices for faceted search and saved search functionality. I also ran queries on a SQL database that tracked user data from an older, smaller application that contained a small subset of the legislative data available to subscribers. The queries revealed which content sets users accessed most, where they spent the most time and which search option they used the most. In the case of the latter, it appeared most users of the site went directly to the \u201cDocument Search\u201d option and entered a specific law number: revealing that the users of this product were particularly savvy about the legislative process and knew exactly what they were looking for.<\/p>\n\n\n\n INFO SYNTHESIS<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n From the insights I gained from my interviews, competitive analysis and behavioral research, I formulated my user tasks: I use these tasks maintain clarity during the design process and refer to them regularly to ensure I the solution aids users in achieving their goals. The top three user tasks for this project were: <\/p>\n\n\n\n (1) Find a bill from the 2018 session of Arkansas\u2019s Senate relating to \u201cGun Control\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n (2) Retrieve the bill AK 2018 HB 100 <\/p>\n\n\n\n (3) Conduct a search for \u201cHealth Care\u201d across all data sets and save the results as a Saved Search<\/p>\n\n\n\n I also ran a card sorting exercise with the SMEs to ensure the preservation of the state data taxonomy and that essential information was displayed clearly and accurately.<\/p>\n\n\n\n DESIGN & REFINE<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Implementing the results I gained during the Research and Information Synthesis stages, I created a style guide and several wireframes options. With the user tasks in the forefront, I conducted an initial usability test of each wireframe iteration with users and SMEs to ensure user goals were achieved. I presented my research on search interface best practices to the team for feedback on design and implementation feasibility. After several iterations of feedback implementation, I created high fidelity compositions and wrote the help documentation. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Stay tuned as this project will be launched on the AWS Marketplace in early spring!<\/p>\n","om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"footnotes":""},"project_category":[10,3,9],"project_tag":[],"class_list":["post-340","project","type-project","status-publish","post-password-required","hentry","project_category-information-architecture","project_category-visual-design","project_category-web-design"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blueberryhaiku.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/project\/340","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blueberryhaiku.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/project"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blueberryhaiku.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/project"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blueberryhaiku.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blueberryhaiku.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=340"}],"version-history":[{"count":31,"href":"https:\/\/blueberryhaiku.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/project\/340\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":597,"href":"https:\/\/blueberryhaiku.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/project\/340\/revisions\/597"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blueberryhaiku.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/436"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blueberryhaiku.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=340"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"project_category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blueberryhaiku.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fproject_category&post=340"},{"taxonomy":"project_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blueberryhaiku.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fproject_tag&post=340"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}