Intro

The Office of Police Accountability (OPA) is part of Seattle’s police accountability system. OPA investigates complaints against Seattle Police Department officers (think Internal Affairs). Anyone can make a complaint. OPA provides independent oversight, supported by a mix of civilian and sworn staff and a civilian Director who makes decisions on allegations free from outside influence.

TIMELINE: The project began in April 2019 and was completed in September 2019. The website continues to be monitored and revised as needed.

My Role

• Project Manager

• User Research and Testing

• Information Architecture

The Problem

OPA has changed a lot in the past couple years, and the web content was outdated. OPA serves two unique audiences- the general public, who can file a complaint of misconduct about a Seattle Police Department (SPD) employee, and SPD employees named in a complaint. The current website is text-heavy with terms and concepts not widely accessible or understandable by public.

Constraints: The website also has design constraints from Seattle IT Web Services that limit design choices to maintain consistency across City department web pages.

Research

Design Solutions

Design Solution 1: Revised Sitemap

Research Findings:

• Difficult to understand categories or level of importance

• Users could not easily find information about OPA, or for on-going and high-profile cases

• Navigation labels did not help explain content

Through early user interviews it was apparent that the site navigation was not the most intuitive to achieve certain goals. We decided to revise the site’s information architecture and update the sitemap.

Advocating for User Research

Open Card Sort

The team was reluctant to do any early user testing. I insisted we get user feedback and asked some friends and family to complete a card sort activity. I also had the team complete the same card sort activity. I then compared the user results with the team’s results to show differences in how users would organize the information and to advocate for the user needs, not internal staff. Two key takeaways from the comparison were:

• Users created fewer categories than team members. We made sure to keep the final number of top line categories closer to the total number users created. On average, users created four main categories. The current live website has five main categories.

• Users were uncertain of certain terms specific to the work OPA does. We had to make sure that these topics would be categorized in a way that was most relatable to users unfamiliar with OPA’s work.

Tree Test

We then created a revised sitemap based on user input and tested the new structure with additional users through a tree test study. In the tree test, we asked users to complete specific tasks that we were unsure of when revising the sitemap to help clarify how best to organize the pages. The revised sitemap reflects the user input from these two activities.

Design Solution 2: Designing for User Needs within a Limited Platform

We worked with Seattle Web Design Services to update layout and navigation designs to improve findability given the design constraints.

2b: Updated Layout Designs

Due to design constraints with the top navigation, there was no option for drop-down menus on the top main navigation menu to show sub-pages. To help orient the user, new page layout designs were used to provide visual cues as to where within the site structure and organization users were. Three distinct layouts are employed according to level within the site hierarchy:

• Level 1: Home Page Layout

• Level 2: Category Page Layout

• Level 3: Content Page Layout

Challenge: Meeting Needs of Different Users

OPA has different audiences. The two main groups are the general public, who may be looking for information or want to file a complaint, and SPD employees who may have been named in a complaint. We created personas to help us understand the different users who would use our site. There are two main user groups- the general public and SPD employees.

Design Solution 3: Updated, Accessible Page Content for Public

The team collectively tackled updating content on all web pages. This step included a Content Audit and revisions to ensure technical information about the office’s services and functions are accessible to a wide audience. This was achieved through language changes and making text easy to skim and digestible.

Additionally, we worked to make it easier to understand what OPA is by including its mission statement on the home page, and using more approachable language to make it easier to find information.

Design Solution 4: Created a ‘For SPD Employees’ Section

Feedback from sworn officers in OPA and from user testing indicated a need for a section specific for SPD employees to find information and updates on complaints they are named in. Our solution was to create a separate section for this user group.

Lessons Learned

I learned about the importance of advocating for UX (and sometimes just doing it, even when told no). Due to Seattle IT constraints, next time we would work to better understand role of constraints, if any, earlier in the design process.

Next Steps: Should our team continue to iterate on the web design, some things to focus on include:

• Further refinement needed to help users (public and SPD employees) find information about a specific closed case or ongoing case

• Further accessibility improvements with a text-heavy site

• OPA is launching a complainant experience evaluation