NIC Chile's coordinators needed hours or days to answer basic questions about domain disputes. I designed one tool that brought four systems and a set of spreadsheets into a single view of every stage, clinic and arbitrator.
NIC Chile runs the registry for the .cl country domain, with more than 600,000 domains registered. Since 2014 it has resolved domain disputes through online arbitration: more than 2,000 requests a year, handled by 33 arbitrators and overseen by 2 coordinators.
The coordinators report the system's performance to NIC Chile's board. To do that, they had to know which stages were slow, which arbitrators were falling behind and how legal clinics were performing.
I owned the research, the information architecture, the data visualization and the interface, which I built in code. A developer refined my code and a database engineer connected it to the real data. On the client side I worked with the Legal Director, the main coordinator and a legal assistant.
Answering "which stage is slowest this quarter?" meant opening up to four systems and several Excel files. Each showed one dataset at a time, so coordinators couldn't compare or correlate anything. Some data existed but had no view at all.
Over a series of sessions, the coordinators walked me through every stage of the dispute protocol, the data each stage produced and the tools they used to look at it, checking my understanding as we went. Three findings shaped the work:
I used the information architecture to consolidate what I learned: sticky notes with the coordinators first, then a structure we iterated on together until it held every question they needed to answer.
The old tools were organised by where data came from. I organised ReCon by the 12 stages a dispute goes through, from the revocation request to final compliance. Each stage shows the same three things: how many cases, how long they take, how many are late.
I listed the questions coordinators asked about each stage and sorted them into historical, comparative or mixed. That decided the chart type, and I tested alternatives against real questions before choosing.
Where two systems each held half an answer, I combined them. The conflict-rate chart now carries the table that used to sit beside it, and domain allocation shows both parties of a dispute.
I built the interface with the developer's UI kit and chart library, so tests used real data shapes and the developers started from working code instead of mockups.
The Legal Director and the coordinators described the tool as a paradigm change for the dispute resolution center.
Organising the tool around the 12 stages gave coordinators a structure they already knew, so every view read like the protocol they follow.
Some edge cases in the data only appeared once it was visible. Next time I'd look at the raw data with the coordinators earlier, before designing the views.
