Website development + UX testing

We are a research team based primarily at Swansea University (UK), and we have recently been awarded a grant to further develop and deploy two prototypes that we made for prevention and detection of online harms. Part of this funding is to contract a developer to help with 1) building a web portal (tool 1), and 2) the user experience testing of our two tools. We have secured a network of stakeholders who will participate in the co-design and UX testing of the tools. We already consulted with these stakeholders when designing our tools' prototypes. Our project started in January 2021 and will run until December 2022. We are looking for a start of the development work in May or June 2021. Our first tool (named "Shield") is a knowledge base addressed at social workers & educators to help them in understanding and identifying the context of specific online harms. The Shield will take the form of a web-based application with authentication, and with offline access enabled for some key content. It will contain various types of content, all provided by us, including text, images, videos, a quiz or some other form of recapping knowledge, and a chatbot (that we also develop). This content is being developed as part of our project and it will be added progressively to the webportal. We expect a final size for the web portal of the order of 20-30 pages. The development work will involve creating the webportal of Shield and populating it with the content that we provide. The chatbot will be provided as a Python deep learning model, with a description of the input shapes and the output. An API will need to be developed to communicate with the chatbot, for example with flask/django or similar, to receive inputs and process them with the deep learning model, and return the response. As part of the communication the input messages will be sent via multiple API requests, so it is then necessary to manage sessions via the API. An interface will need to be designed to send messages and to receive and display the chatbot's response together with some textual description of the response provided by the chatbot (e.g. "the chatbot is now using strategy X"). The Shield tool will need to be deployed on AWS or similar. Suggestions on a deployment solution to minimise the cloud cost would be welcome. Our stakeholders will provide guidance on the design of the webportal, and they will be consulted regularly, including an initial consultation before the start of the development work. We expect that these consultations will be part of the UX work. Our second tool (name "Spotter") is a machine learning based tool that analyses chatlogs to detect instances of online harms, and the strategies used. It is addressed at the police to help them scan large quantities of digital materials. This tool will be fully developed and deployed by us, on a partner police's servers. The work related to this tool will be solely on UX testing, using our network of police stakeholders. A logo and associated branding (colour/font schemes) will be provided. The project has a digital designer who is already working on this.