I'd like to think my design played a small part in them also being officially recognised by the ASP and ICC, and in them receiving huge EU funding for future events and training programs in 2017.

PROJECT PLANNING

Starting the project with just six weeks to deliver the initial MVP meant there was a lot to do. With 51 stakeholders, all with very busy schedules and different priorities, having a plan and UX strategy was very important to have to keep the project on track. Things of course will come up and change, but having a basic guide of what processes you should be focussing on and what stage the project should be at. This made sure it ran smoothly and reminded me when I should be drawing lines under certain things and starting others.

STAKEHOLDER MEETINGS

From the initial meetings with the main ICCBA stakeholders, it was clear that they needed to redesign their site to reflect the professional standards of the organisation, it's philosophy and future goals. Something none of them felt the current site was doing. The site they had was very basic. Most of it's pages had almost no content, making the organisation look inactive and giving back very little to it's members. The registration and payment process was overly complicated, putting people off registering and requiring a lot of manual maintenance, wasting elected member's time better used elsewhere.

HEURISTIC REVIEW & COMPETITOR ANALYSIS

The questionnaire revealed a lot but I also made sure to meet as many stakeholders from the executive council and all committees, and support staff and interns working at the ICC. Over skype and with a few trips to the Hague I started to collect some good qualitative data, like how they wanted the site to look and feel. I even started sketching ideas for layout and pageflow etc. I was also able to start (utilising some soft skills) to discover the things all stakeholders were in agreement should take priority. Simply by including them all at this early stage meant there was less chance of disagreement or nasty surprises later on.

There were a few to many tabs in the global navigation. All of which led to pages with no content.

The carousel was 'annoying', 'moved too fast' and when it moved on you could no longer click to register.

People wanted to be able to contact specific committees with specific requests.

The 'who we represent' was not clear enough.

News story was old and made site look inactive.

The logo was seen as a bit 'unfriendly' and 'looks like prosecution', should be 'defence and victims' and more approachable.

'Our Mission' and 'Services' was uninformative and needed to be clearer, not just lifted from the constitution.

All members (full, associate and affiliate) were made to fill in an application form to register which listed ICC members found unnecessary, they were already on a list afterall. They would then have to wait for the ICCBA to accepted it, let them know and provide bank details so that the applicant could then transfer the money via bank transfer.

STAKEHOLDER & USER INTERVIEWS

RESEARCH

I wrote and distributed a questionnaire to all stakeholders and to legal teams working in the Hague. Having immediate access to all the elected members, who represented a cross-section of their users, meant the early stages of research yielded a lot of useful data. However, with so many stakeholders from different committees it was key to identify the main shared needs of the organisation in order to prioritise what things to focus on. Doing this helped further outline the strategy moving forward and in prioritising features. It was apparent early on that along with the quantitative requirements like increasing membership, the stakeholders wanted the site to also act as a sounding board; allowing them to push the ICCBA's message, build bonds with other Bar Associations, and further strengthen their application to be officially accepted by the ICC.

STAKEHOLDER & USER QUESTIONNAIRE

ARCHETYPAL USERS

Unlike a Service as Software or E-commerce site, the type of persona I needed to make was slightly different for the ICCBA. The organisation's constitution outlined the three categories of membership, and these would act as my three persona types. All the data from my research was then used to 'fill out' these categorisations with user's needs and pain points to discover and improve the ways they interact with the ICCBA.

Full Members:
Defence & Victim's Counsel

Associate Members: Legal Support Staff

Affiliate Members:
Other Lawyers, Students, Professors etc

SOME KEY ASSUMPTIONS REVISED

Some of my assumptions had been supported from my research such as: the onboarding system was stopping some people signing up and most users were visiting on desktop devices. But, more interestingly, a few assumptions needed to be revised, such as:

1. Lead and Co Counsel would not be interested to contribute content to the site. This wasn't the case but they implied they might need some 'encouragement' to.

2. The classic "Why would we need to offer that when the ICC site already does it?". It became clear the ICC site was very unpopular and hard to navigate, something I could offer in a much simpler way on the new ICCBA site.

3. Affiliate Members would not be interested in registering at the moment. This was also not the case with a third saying they would be happy "just donating" to help the ICCBA grow and develop.

ANALYSIS

During the interview sessions and meetings with Committees, I also carried out heuristic reviews of the old ICCBA site and the current ICC site to try and identify where improvements could be made and/or cherry pick some of the things people liked about them.

During the research a point that kept coming up was how bad the ICC site was. So I carried out a heuristic review on it during the interviews. We also looked at other leading Bar Association and law firms' sites to establish the design styles and layouts that were most popular.

STRATEGY

With the strategy laid out, the build of the MVP site could begin. Using an iterative design methodology, I would design > test > deploy > design > test > iterate continually. I would also have to make sure all content was collected in good time so that it was available when the next stage of the build was to be implemented. Below is a visual representation of the site roadmap, with the strategy plan below that. Again useful checklists for myself and a good way to keep the stakeholders informed

DESIGN & TEST

As well as outlining what types of content should be produced, having found out that members were willing to contribute but they just needed some help, I also created a simple form that was a call to action and would collect and encourage the members to write an article or report for the site.

This could be sent to a member by the ICCBA, and definitely helped simplify and encourage the contribution of content for the site.

I have also been helping them plan a strategy for their training modules, using a Learning Experience Rubric, to help make sure the modules are objective oriented and suitable for the intended Learners.

CONTENT STRATEGY

From the very beginning of this project, even during the early stages of research, I was already starting to sketch ideas and test them. I find quick sketches are very good at finding out what's working and what isn't without wasting valuable time on making the designs you are inevitably going to alter and iterate too high fidelity, too early. Then from those sketches I could quickly increase fidelity as changes were being made, knowing the design was always moving forwards. With 'fast fails' I could expedite the whole design process and discover 'faster success'.

ITERATIONS OF THE HOMEPAGE

RESPONSIVE DESIGN

COLLABORATIVE DESIGN

With all the information gathered I was able to do the following: identify the quantitative and qualitative needs of the stakeholders and users, get an idea of what the site and organisation's look and feel would be, found ways in which to improve onboarding and payment, and brought to light that Affiliate members should be considered when making the new site.

Having found out from the users and stakeholders the most popular features and things the organisation could offer it's members, combined with all the other information gathered, I was able to create a more solid strategy in terms of what would be in the MVP, but also what things would follow and in what order.

Above are some examples of how testing helped form and drive my design decisions. Here we see how the Homepage evolved. From the earliest sketches in a notebook, all the way through to the final design. Layouts are changed, content moved and prioritised, and CTAs added to help get the user to where they want to get, and do what they want to do.

Although we found most users where visiting the ICCBA site on a desktop or ipad, we did find some people, especially from some of the less developed nations, would access it on their smartphones.

The site I built was adaptive (due to time constraints and my coding skills having their limitations) but I designed the site with responsivity in mind so that, when the site is further developed, all functionality and content could be viewed on all devices.

After the MVP was launched the strategy was followed and allowed the site to naturally grow and introduce more content and features as time went on.

Here you can see how the homepage followed the plan. Highlighted here are where features, focal points and content were added, and how later on some sections were moved to populate other pages, and some element's layouts were redesigned.

I wasn't just testing sketches of layout at this early stage. Because this project involved me designing the entire site it also touched upon visual design elements such as the new 'look and feel' of the organisation itself, a new logo, icons, UI, and colour palette.

Again I made sure of continual involvement and collaboration with the council and committee members, even for the design processes. Options were circulated and voted on, and I would conduct small design studios during interviews and, surprisingly quickly, we were able to start to settle on how the new site/logo/icons etc would look.

USABILITY TESTING

I wrote the scripts, and facilitated all the user tests. They included '5-second exposure tests', AB testing, task oriented testing, remote testing and reacting to user feedback received after the MVP was launched.

There is no better way to discover hard to spot but easy to fix problems than with user testing.

As a UX designer you are fully immersed in the product you are working on, and sometimes things that make perfect sense to you, can actually baffle a user. Testing keeps that in check.

BUILD & DELIVER

Due to time and money constraints I proposed that I would build them a simple site that would cover all their main needs. Later down the line, when they had funding, they could then expand on what I had built to add the functionality they would want in the future: a subscription site with member's only areas, where members could have accounts and which could offer online training.

I built the site using site creation software and some basic CSS and Javascript.

Logo: designed by consensus

Icons: from sketches to final

The solution was to remove the need for 'ICC list counsel and staff' to fill out application forms, instead having a simple check box to confirm they were on the ICC list. Also to implement an online payment system, allowing for credit card and paypal payments directly through the site. Affiliate members now could also upload CVs and other information that before required a lot of back-and-forth with the ICCBA.

STRATEGIC GROWTH

The inclusion of news stories reporting on the ICCBA's meetings and collaboration with other international Bars was very important, and has been cited as making the site a great networking tool for them, building their connections and communicating their thoughts on an open platform.

The continual addition of new content, whether that be news stories or the President's Newsletter, which came from the content strategy to have more content for the users, could all be published on the site and all helped to give users more reason to engage with, and learn more from, the ICCBA site.

Position: Lead UX/Product Designer | Duration: Seven months

ICCBA CASE STUDY

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