Results of ecoi.net User Survey 2007 now available

ecoi.net is constantly striving to improve its services. In order to find out more about your needs we conducted an online user survey during the months of February and March. A summary of the results is now available.

Strong Points

The following issues were mentioned as strong points of ecoi.net (sorted by frequency of occurance):

• Variety and quality of sources, wide range of sources
• Currency of information
• Search engine, advanced search options, full-text search
• Alert service and other features for personalised users
• Topics & Issues files
• Clearly-arranged information, user-friendly interface
• Sorted Research Resources
• Link to Refugee Law Reader
• Short summaries in English and German provided for most documents

Technical Problems and Usability

A few technical problems were raised in your feedback. We are currently working to solve these issues:

• Slow performance of search function and selection of country
• Automatic swap of languages when selecting a country or running a search query (especially from English to German)
• Search around hits are not always properly displayed in search results
• Special characters are not always correctly displayed (especially in search results)

The performance of the search function as well as the selection of countries was improved over the last weeks. Nevertheless we hope to further speed up navigation on ecoi.net.

Different suggestions on how to improve the selection of countries and the search features were made. It was also proposed to display Important Documents and all documents for one country on the same page again. We are now running a comparative analysis of systems similar to ecoi.net in order to find sustainable solutions on how to increase usability of the above mentioned features.

Suggested further Improvements

Besides the technical problems and usability issues several improvements with regard to content, but also technical developments, were suggested. The implementation of these tasks is subject to available resources:

• More full-text national laws and information on their implementation; national and international jurisdiction containing country of origin information
• More documents in German and French (and possibly additional languages, eg Spanish); translations of documents into German, French, Italian (and possibly additional languages); French-language interface for ecoi.net
• Improve visibility and currency of existing Topics & Issues files; add Topics & Issues files for more countries
• Detailed description of locations in short summaries of documents provided by ecoi.net
• More information on historical background of countries and return issues
• Additional search features: Proximity search (SEARCH TERM 1 and SEARCH TERM 2 within eg 25 words), restrict search to core sources (pre-defined list; define more than one source to restrict your search to), limited area search (search selected websites not covered by ecoi.net), “suggest function” when entering search terms; search for a specific date
• Add information on additional features for personalised users on homepage
• Add links to Sorted Research Resources and country-specific links section
• Provide all documents as PDF files
• Establish a forum as communication platform for users

We will keep you updated on new developments and the implemenation of new features.

Please continue to send in feedback on problems occuring when using ecoi.net and suggestions on how to further improve usability and quality of the COI portal.

The following document below contains detailed statistics of your feedback on ecoi.net: ecoi.net user survey 2007 statistics

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