New website – Special Tribunal for Lebanon

Leading a website relaunch for an international tribunal

The Special Tribunal for Lebanon is an international tribunal established by the United Nations to hold trials for the people accused of carrying out the attack of 14 February 2005 which killed 23 people, including the former prime minister of Lebanon, Rafiq Hariri, and injured many others. I led the website relaunch and was in charge of all aspects of the project from experience design to creating and managing a team.

Screenshot of the homepage for the Special Tribunal for Lebanon website

The challenge

The tribunal needed to use the web more effectively to explain its mission to the Lebanese people. The website had to work in the three official languages of the tribunal: English, French and Arabic. The tribunal was a technologically resistant organisation with conflicting stakeholders. The political situation in Lebanon made the project very sensitive. These factors - and others - made it a challenging project.

The solution

From surveys, interviews and analytics, I identified three main audience groups:

  1. General public - general information and to check accuracy of media reports
  2. Journalists - research stories and get the latest updates
  3. Lawyers and academics - search for legal documents and watch live streaming video from the courtroom

We tried to serve these groups in the most effective ways: creating content to explain the work of the tribunal, as well as structuring the court filings to aid browsing and searching. The website has been very well received. Pageviews are up. Time spent on site has doubled. In short, the project is a success.

My role in the project

I led the website relaunch and was in charge of all aspects of the project: