> Public-Sector Treaty Search System UI/UX Design
MOFA Treaty Search System
A public-sector search system for browsing more than 3,000 treaties the Republic of Korea has signed, down to the original scanned documents.
- Client
- Ministry of Foreign Affairs
- Role
- Search Results Design100%
- Document Viewer Design100%
- UI Design100%
- Responsive100%
- Skills
- Public SectorSearch UXDocument ViewerResponsiveData-Heavy
Challenge
Treaty material doesn't fit one shape. Bilateral and multilateral treaties need different information on display, and the material itself varies — agreements, conventions, protocols, exchange notes. Some need their Korean, Mongolian, and English texts checked side by side; some need their articles compared against another treaty; some run hundreds of pages of scanned originals that have to be checked directly. With this much material, in that many different shapes and ways of being read, the challenge was to hold it all together as one consistent experience — without losing the trust and readability a government service requires.
Objective
Fit treaty material of every different shape and reading pattern into one consistent way of navigating, and design a search-results screen and document viewer that get visitors to the treaty and article they want in as few moves as possible. The goal was to hold a consistent information structure and UI across very different needs — multilingual comparison, cross-treaty comparison, large scanned documents — and build a responsive UI that carries through naturally from desktop to mobile.
Process
Most people who come to this system are checking one specific article. Reading a treaty start to finish is rare.
Need to find one exact article in one exact treaty, and check it against the original.
Compare multiple treaties, or check how wording differs across languages.
Just checking what treaties exist.
What all three groups shared was wanting to reach exactly the part they needed, fast. That diagnosis became the standard behind every screen that followed.
“The most common failure in a service handling this much material is trying to show all of it. The more material there is, the more narrowly you have to define what the user is actually trying to do right now — this project confirmed that.”
