Margaret Allen's blog

Does the World Bank search engine frustrate or amaze you? Have you spent hours searching our website for research, reports, or project information only to feel like you're going in circles? Wish you could share your great idea about improving the www.worldbank.org search engine or project information with the World Bank web team?

Although we overhauled the World Bank search engine more than a year ago, we plan to make additional improvements to the user interface and filtering options soon. We need your help!

Can you find the GDP of China using the World Bank website in fewer than 4 clicks? We challenge you! 

If you're like many of our website visitors, you probably look for information based on a particular country of interest. And, like many of our visitors, you may find it challenging to find what you need.

The good news is that the World Bank will soon roll out new designs for our "Country" site sections. The China site section will be the first to pilot the new and improved design, with other countries to follow.

That's where we need your help! We want our website visitors to participate in our redesign and help us measure our own performance. After all, how do we know if we've actually improved if we don't benchmark ourselves?

So, I invite you to join me on an online "scavenger hunt" for information on the current China site section. We'll ask you to find some of the most frequently sought-after tid-bits of information. We'll gather some aggregate data on how easy it was for our users to find this information BEFORE the redesign. We'll also ask you for your overall feedback and suggestions for new features. Then we'll do it again AFTER the redesign to make sure we're improving - with you, our website visitor, in mind.

You don't have to be an expert on China, though frequent users of China-related information are encouraged to participate! Only a general understanding of the World Bank and development is required, however.

It's fun and easy to participate, and will only take a few moments of your time. Begin the online scavenger hunt by clicking here.

We need hundreds of responses to ensure our reporting is representative of our world-wide audience, so please help by participating! We'll share aggregate results on this blog in the coming months.

Speak Chinese? This activity is now available in 中文.

Last March, I received an email from a blind user of the World Bank website:

“I am writing to express my serious concern about the inaccessibility of the World Bank Web site. The information is clearly a valuable resource for individuals, agencies, institutions, and the list goes on and on, but the information is only as good if it is accessible! … The World Bank site is filled with incredibly useful information, but the site is written without attention to making sure the information is accessible to EVERYONE!”

The user went on to cite specific problems that his screen reader encountered on the World Bank site. Last Friday was World Disability Day, and I wanted to share with you the World Bank’s plan to introduce accessibility best practices onto the website. 

You might have noticed a change to the World Bank website search over the last month. In December 2009, we launched changes to the site search. These changes included an updated look-and-feel, additional database sources, and additional search options and tools.

This intermediate release represents our efforts to address the voice of our website users, who have expressed low satisfaction with the site search. We’ve been formally measuring online customer satisfaction since 2007, and our results have shown consistently low satisfaction within two areas of the website: search and navigation. ('Content,' by the way, receives the highest satisfaction score). Well, it's about time we do something to address this issue!

I should note that for the moment, the changes are only present on the English website, with other languages targeted for future releases.

Within the next year or so, you’ll see even more extensive changes to the search and underlying technology. In the mean time, we want to know what our users think about our current changes! That feedback will help us prioritize new features and make improvements in the future.

We conducted a usability assessment of the new site search to determine areas for future improvement. We interviewed 12 users about their experience with the website search, and discovered the following:

• Tabs within search results often went unnoticed
• Users appreciated the improved ability to narrow results by facets, but found our facets a bit confusing
• Users expected the "All" tab to incorporate results from every section/tab. [Obvious, right? But, due to limitations in our search technology and the way our information is stored across multiple, separate databases, this has been an ongoing challenge!]
• Users expected to see more up-to-date results
• Users would appreciate the ability to search for people or authors of certain reports
• Speed is improved, but still a concern, particularly for users outside the United States
   

I oversee the usability testing for the World Bank website, and I’m always eager to learn more about how our various audiences use the site. The user testing we performed on our new search revealed terrific insights about the needs and preferences of our various audience segments.

We’re constantly striving to improve, so if you do have a chance to use the new search, please send your feedback to our search team or leave a comment below! Do elements of the interface confuse or help you? Are you obtaining useful results? How can we improve your ability to narrow the results? How is the speed/performance in your region of the world? Did you experience any errors?

Tell us, we want to know!