British Columbia Law Institute
My Role: UI/UX Designer
Duration: Sep 2021 - Dec 2021
Client: British Columbia Law Institute
About BCLI: The BC Law Institute (BCLI) is a not-for-profit law reform agency that has been working since 1997 to improve and modernize the law in British Columbia.
BCLI engages in scholarly research, writing, and analysis for law reform, and collaborates with the government and other entities to provide materials and support to promote public awareness and understanding.
Challenge
Design a website that offers a cohesive experience and the ability to add and present different parts of the organization (such as the Canadian Centre for Elder Law and the Centre for Indigenous Law,…) in the future. Improve the user experience of people who are searching for various legal documents.
Goals
1.
Integrate CCEL (Canadian Centre for Elder Law) into the BCLI system.
2.
Allow users to search documents based on multiple categories.
3.
Revise the structure of the individual documents and posts.
4.
Facilitate a better user experience when trying to locate specific categories of documents.
Research
Competitive Analysis
We researched some of the BCLI "competitors" in Canada and reviewed their user experience. A lot of the institutions appeared dated and very rarely updated.
Part of the project was also redesigning the visual identity and based on our observations we decided to differentiate BCLI with the distinctive style of illustrations.
Compared Law institutes in Canada:
Alberta Law Reform Institute
Manitoba Law Reform Commission
Law Reform of Saskatchewan
Law Commission of Ontario Access to Justice &
Law Reform Institute of Nova Scotia
Sitemap
The navigation on the website has been simplified to give users a faster way to access different sectors and their active and completed projects, as well as publications.
More sectors will be added in the future to give users another option to find documents related to particular topics.
Design
The main navigation on the site has an advanced search function, allowing users to filter and search publications by sector, year, and type.
To accommodate potential growth (adding new sectors), we need to devise a solution that is simple to use and comprehend.
By categorizing and displaying different publications in a table format, users are able to quickly scan through them and easily organize them using the sorting options.
Visual Design
Learnings
Be careful when dealing with the extensive database
Initially, I had not anticipated how painful the process of redesigning the database would be for our developers. Had I known, I would have devised a different strategy.
Plan more in the beginning phase
We should have identified the pages that needed to be removed or merged and agree on the final structure of the website. This would have saved us time and effort in the long run.