What 3,000 Citizens and Lawmakers Taught Us About Institutional Trust
My role: UX Researcher
Team composition: ALEPE's internal tech team (1 PM, 2 Developers), Me, and an external Project Manager
Timeline: 1.5 months
Key deliverables: User journeys, JTBDs, Research plan, Quantitative research, Qualitative interviews, Card sorting, Website usability analysis
I was brought in as a UX Researcher for a month-and-a-half deep-dive: journey mapping, JTBDs, card sorting, and usability diagnostics. I worked with an external PM, two internal devs, and ALEPE’s own tech team.
The mission? Deliver a research dossier with a clear plan, revised flows, and content prioritization tailored to political, social, and institutional needs.
Every deliverable needed to speak to both the people and the lawmakers.
When I joined, ALEPE’s website was slow, outdated, and chaotic.
Critical bugs in law searches and delays in the Official Gazette caused key area traffic to drop sharply. In a call with the tech manager, it became clear that redesigning the visuals wouldn’t cut it.
That’s when I proposed a research plan focusing on uncovering why people used the site, not just how.
We kicked things off with a candid internal workshop to align goals and gather stories from support and media teams.
I then dove into Hotjar data and past reports.
I put together a research plan that included an online survey with over 3,000 users and deep interviews (with confidentiality agreements).
The survey helped segment user profiles, and card sorting revealed that 80% of users came to “check case files” or “access the Official Gazette”, not to read general news.
The site wasn’t being used by engaged citizens, it was being used by internal legislative analysts.
I distilled this into three strong HMWs: “How might we highlight the Official Gazette?”, “How might we guarantee Legislators execute their work properly?”, and “How might we integrate the legislative agenda without overwhelming the homepage?”
With quantitative data in hand, I defined five user profiles: general public, lawyers, legislative aides, law students, and press.
So I organized a card-sorting workshop sessions where participants grouped items based on their JTBDs.
Emotion ran high: one user said they spent hours “digging through the site” when they should’ve been preparing for a public hearing.
To ALEPE, the site was a symbol of transparency and civic engagement.
Choosing to prioritize card sorting over full usability testing was a tough call, but with the timeline in mind, we chose depth over flows.
We could’ve reassigned a dev to prototype ideas faster, but instead, the team stayed focused on implementing core changes.
Card sorting ended up being a practical and political win: it helped prioritize the information hierarchy without overpromising output.
Although the new site hasn’t launched due to bureaucratic processes, the research dossier caused a ripple effect: ALEPE’s leadership adopted our content hierarchy into their development roadmap.
The tech team began referencing our card-sorting outputs in weekly meetings.
The breakthrough came when we decided to prioritize the Legislators agenda (the main user of the website). They were the ones impacting the work of the house and needed the website to work.
That moment aligned everyone behind making the website useful for legislators and transparent to the general public, lawyers, concerned citizens, etc.
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