We’ve recently made some tweaks to the Clicklaw topics as a result of the usability testing we conducted over the summer. More improvements resulting from the usability testing will be coming in 2010.

 Here’s a quick summary of the updates to the topics:

• “Victims & crime” is being split into two different topics: Victims of crime, and Crimes & offences
• “Immigrants” is being expanded to Immigrants & refugees
• We’re adding a new topic: Cars & getting around

As a result of these small changes to the topics, some of the resources on Clicklaw may be temporarily affected. For the rest of this week only, if you use the above topics to search for resources, you may not get completely accurate results. The Clicklaw team is updating all of the resources affected by this. Our goal is to have all of the resources updated by the end of the week, so hopefully this will cause as little disruption as possible.

You can find the new taxonomy posted on the Clicklaw Blog under the PLEI Taxonomy tab.

We have released the PLEI Taxonomy, v. 4.0 (PDF, 38KB), which is the version of the taxonomy being used on Clicklaw. This version features:

• a scaling back on the Topics facet (formerly called Legal Issues), reducing the number of topics and eliminating subcategories
• grouping of the Topics by client-centred labels such as “Your money”, “Your family”, “Your safety”, and so on
• the elimination of the Audience facet, which has been replaced by the use of client-centred section names on Clicklaw

(We see the client-centred section names as a better approach to meeting the needs of users than audience labels. By structuring the Clicklaw site to reflect what users are trying to accomplish — e.g., “solve problems” — we don’t need to ask them to identify themselves as a member of an audience group — e.g., “a person with a legal issue” — that may make them uncomfortable.)

These changes were informed by feedback from contributor organizations as well as ongoing content analysis work done by the Clicklaw project team. For more background, see the PLEI Taxonomy section.

Over the last two months we’ve had a chance to hear feedback on the Clicklaw wireframe prototype and to test out how well the wireframe held up with real content added. We’ve folded the insights gained into a final version of the wireframe: the Clicklaw wireframe prototype 2.0.

Among the changes in the wireframe prototype 2.0 that we’re really excited about:

• client-centred section names: the names of the four main sections now reflect what Clicklaw users will come to the site to do: Solve Problems, Learn & Teach, Reform & Research, (find help on the) HelpMap
• client-centred groupings of topics: in the Solve Problems & HelpMap sections, topics are grouped by client-centred labels: Your family, Your money, Your safety, Your daily life, etc.
• taxonomy scaled back: the taxonomy has been scaled back to fewer legal issues, allowing the most common & most disruptive legal problems to stand out more
• tags, a new feature: new are tags added (optionally) by contributor organizations, providing specific pathways to information and reflecting the diversity of our PLEI community

A slideshow tour of wireframe prototype 2.0 is embedded below and available to view or download on SlideShare.  The tour of the wireframe prototype 2.0 is also in PDF format (980KB).

We now shift into the coding stage of the development, targeting April 2009 for launch of Clicklaw.  

We have released an updated version of the PLEI Taxonomy, v. 3.0 (PDF, 49KB). The taxonomy will be used to describe content on Clicklaw, allowing users additional pathways to locate what they’re looking for. This version of the taxonomy expands the number of Legal Issues, to meet the needs of Clicklaw’s users (as reflected in the project’s personas). This version also simplifies some of the other facets (Audience, Media Format, and Source) and adds two new facets (Resource Type and Type of Help). These changes were informed by user testing of a wireframe prototype of the Clicklaw site, as well as content analysis work done by the Clicklaw project team and input from organizations formally participating in the project. For more background, see the PLEI Taxonomy section.