A sketch from my notebook, while I was observing a waiting room in a Court Service center in Boston, for people who were waiting for help with housing cases.
What should a paper-based warning or order look like, to make it actionable and clear for people? Ideas42 worked with the New York City government to create new designs of the Summons document that people get for criminal court cases. Read more about it at Ideas42 page.
This change in the document accompanies more systemic changes.
THE PLAN
Steps to ensure that people who receive a summons appear in court include:
- A redesigned summons form that makes the date of appearance easier to understand. The City and courts worked with ideas42, a non-profit behavioral design lab, to redesign the summons form making information easier to understand in order to better prompt people to return to court. Additionally, the new form will collect individuals’ phone numbers and include a phone number and website where recipients can access their cases, view when their court appearance is scheduled, and determine whether they have outstanding warrants. The website will also have translated copies of the summons form. The new form will be operational this summer. A comparison of the old form and the new form, and additional information about the science driving these changes, is available above. This effort was funded by the Laura and John Arnold Foundation.
- A reminder system to ensure defendants appear in court. The courts will test a number of different reminders citywide during the fall of 2015, using both robocalls and text messages. The results of this pilot will be carefully examined and the most effective method will be scaled up citywide.
- Flexible appearance date and night court. Sometimes people who want to make their court appearances and resolve their cases sometimes have work, family or other life conflicts with their court dates. Beginning with a pilot in Manhattan North, individuals who have received summonses will be permitted to appear any time a week in advance of their court appearance. The court will also be open until 8:00 p.m. on Tuesdays. If these pilots increase court appearances, the programs will be scaled up citywide.
Steps to enhance transparency and improve the quality of justice in summons court include:
- Publicly available quarterly data. Four times a year, the City will post data showing summons activity broken down by charge and precinct, allowing access to enforcement trends on the neighborhood level. Going forward, the police department’s annual report will also include summons activity with details such as the location at which a summons is issued and the race of the recipient. Explore this data.
- Real-time, electronic access to case files. Since April 2015, the Court has been providing defense attorneys with tablets that provide them with all of the factual allegations docketed for that day so they can better advise their clients and quicken the adjudication process.
- Online payment of fines. Beginning this summer, the courts will implement a new process permitting people convicted of summons offenses to pay fines online.
- Training on collateral consequences for court-appointed attorneys and Judicial Hearing Officers. Since late March 2015, court-appointed attorneys and Judicial Hearing Officers have been trained in how to better advise clients about the collateral consequences associated with summonses.
Source: Summons Reform
Ideas42, the Behavioral Design Lab, has more details about how they chose to redesign the form to better work with people’s behavior and biases.
One of the insights we discovered was related to New Yorkers’ mental models, or personal understandings and beliefs, based on impressions or anecdotal information, of what the court experience would be like and what it represented. In this case, attending court was strongly associated with lost work time and wages, unrealistically steep fines, and uncomfortable experiences. These perceptions were strong enough that some people who were fully aware of arrest warrants for FTA still chose to miss their court date. In doing so, they were avoiding a negative experience now while risking a far worse one—arrest— down the line. Furthermore, many people who received summonses for small offenses—like spitting or littering—felt that having to go to court was a penalty that far outweighed their mental model of the violation’s seriousness. In other words, the punishment didn’t fit the crime, so they chose not to appear.
Some of these negative perceptions were further compounded because many New Yorkers affected by summonses are lower-income and experiencing some form of time and/or resource scarcity, making juggling workday court appointments and far off dates even more difficult. For those experiencing scarcity, it can be challenging to change work schedules or make other necessary arrangements to appear in court. Many don’t have steady work shifts, making the 2-3 month delay between summons issue and court dates an additional hassle. During this lag time, some people we interviewed reported experiencing unpredictable changes in job or housing, making it even more difficult to plan ahead for a court date.
With these and other insights from behavioral science in mind, we redesigned the physical layout of the pink summons ticket. The new form prominently features the appearance date and court location at the top of the ticket, where people are more likely to see it (the old version had this information at the very bottom where it was easily overlooked). The new form also clearly states in bold typeface that missing the assigned court date will lead to a warrant (important information that was completely absent from the previous form). Behavioral science tells us that simple tweaks like these can have an outsized impact on how people act.
Source, Ideas42 blog here
CAIR Chicago has sponsored a new initiative to mobilize legal help and interpreters (as well as knowledge) for people at risk of civil rights violation or immigration problems. Their Travelers Assistance Project was launched to give travelers alerts, assemble an Attorney Corps, and an Interpreters Corps.
T.A.P CAIR-Chicago’s Traveler’s Assistance Project, a first of its kind nationally, created to help travelers secure legal help in light of the #MuslimBan. T.A.P is ONE stop shop. It includes an online system that collects at-risk traveler information and puts it in a queue for our in-house Attorney Corps and legal teams of our partner organizations to streamline on our ability to assist on the ground. It provides important traveler “know your rights” updates. Lastly, you can sign up to join us as a volunteer attorney or interpreter.
Dulles Justice Coalition is a grassroots organization in the DC area, in which lawyers have come together to provide help to immigrants. Specifically, it arose after the January Executive Order that upset the travel plans and border-crossings of refugees and people from Muslim-majority countries.
They formed as an impromptu group and also stood up a website to take in requests for legal help.
They also embedded legal precedents and other research as resources for lawyers to use. They created a lengthy Resources for Lawyers google doc, with definitions, case precedents, and other files and references for pro bono lawyers to use.
Today we held our Prototyping Access to Justice class on-site at San Mateo County court house, specifically in and around the Self-Help Center and Family Law Facilitator.
The six student teams are all at the point where they have working prototypes that they want to test. They each have hypotheses about how they can make the legal system better for people without lawyers, and have embodied these hypotheses into a new tool — digital- or paper-based.
Instead of our usual class setting at a design studio at Stanford’s d.school, we created an impromptu class space in the Waiting Area on the 2nd floor of the Superior Court, where people are lining up to see people at the Self- Help Center, or are waiting to be called for an appointment. Some of the teams also set up testing spaces inside the Self Help Center, for when people had down-time after they had filled in forms or were waiting for next-steps.
The teams sought out people to give quick feedback, as well as longer experiential testing. They had interactive click-through prototypes of digital tools, paper mockups of new tools, posters and floor pathways for navigation, and tablets with new feedback forms. They had gift cards to give to user testers, to compensate for their time.
They tested their prototypes in small groups — with some taking notes (or translating into Spanish) and others leading the questions. They also had designer and developer coaches with them, to help them spot new opportunities and to run the testings.
Takewaways
So what were the takeaways? I was able to pull out some high-level insights during my debriefs with each team, as well as some specific points for improvement.
1. The forms are too many and too complex. This was a refrain that each team heard from users, no matter if their questions and prototype revolved around forms or not. If there is one big message that family law litigants have for courts, it is: make your forms easier to understand, and easier to complete.
There is an overload of paperwork, that is laid out in a way that does not make sense to people, and overwhelms them.
2. Little things about court — like parking, way finding, and security checks — have a big influence on people’s experience. Though we as lawyers might think about the legal procedure, forms, and hearings as the main determinants of people’s procedural justice and sense of fairness about court, there are other more pedestrian factors that shape their time with the legal system. If parking is difficult, expensive, or with a ticking timer, this puts an extra layer of pressure and confusion. If the security guards doing initial checks at the door are adversarial or cold, this raises the stress level of people and sets them off on a bad foot. If there is confusion about where they are going or how to get there, people lose confidence in themselves and feel that they are wasting time and not being strategic.
3. Pathways on the Floor should be implemented immediately. Our team Chukka-Ryorui, who are focused on improving navigation, put down a dotted red line from the building’s entrance to the Self Help Center on the 2nd floor. They used masking tape to make the line — and it took less than half an hour to implement. The feedback was universally positive. People were able to follow it and understand it without any complicated explanation. Users reported that they already are familiar with this pattern from hospitals, and appreciate having it here. They want bold color lines that they can follow easily, along with complementary signage.
We recommend that courts implement colored floor pathways for their most popular routes: Self Help Center, County Clerk, and Jury Services primarily. This is a relatively cheap intervention (vinyl floor paths are not that expensive) that can have a major impact.
4. “Out-of-Court Homework” Tasks must be Modeled + with reminders. As we heard from litigants and from staff, the most common fail points are around all the tasks that the litigant cannot do at the court, but must do outside. Getting service of process done, and done correctly, with the paperwork noted correctly with address, date, and other pieces of data is a very common failure. Also, remembering to get this done at the right time is also a fail point.
Some of the recommendations in this space is to have more reminder services that proactively reach out to the litigant to tell them they have to do this task before their service.
Also, the demand is for models of forms that have been done correctly, with annotations about why it is correct and how to do it right.
5. Be Mobile First, with guides and tools for the phone. The overwhelming majority of the people we spoke with have mobile phones, and are willing to use them to get legal tasks done. Tools must be built for phones, not desktops.
We are setting a bounty for the best new product that lets people understand processes and fill out forms using the phone. Even if this is not ideal — even if we wish that people would have the big screens of a desktop computer when they’re doing complex processes, they will be using mobile phones and paper handouts most of the time in practice.
Six. Maps are key. The team that was testing out a giant, slightly comic-based map of child custody process got great reviews. People responded well to their characters and to the map-based view.
They are thinking in terms of both a paper-based map (that could be a wall poster of a general ‘happy path’ of how the process works in the ideal, combined with a booklet of in-detail maps that include detours). And in terms of a digital map, that could be zoomed in.
People were able to instantly figure out the paper based map. They know how to use it. The digital map was harder — people were more hesitant to use it, and to know what to touch on the screen in order to see what would happen.
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More insights to come as our class proceeds — stay tuned for more of our design work and proposals for making Self Help Centers and the legal system more user-friendly.
I am also quite excited about setting up a more regular pop-up design lab on site at courts and other points in the legal system. To create more relevant and interactive designs, having input directly from litigants and court professionals is highly valuable. And doing the prototyping in the environment also helps the designs better mesh with this particular context, and what affordances and opportunities already exist there.
One of my Brazilian students in my Prototyping Access to Justice class alerted me to a very cool app in Brazil, all about empowering people about their legal rights.
It’s called Carteirada do Bem. It’s a native app (on Android) and (on ioS) + a website. It is put out by the assembly of Rio di Janeiro.
It is an in-your-pocket tool for a citizen, to know what their legal rights are in a given situation. They can open the app, pick which domain their scenario is in (medical, at work, at a store, etc.). Then they can find the specific situation they’re in, and when they click on that — they get a quick, easy summary of what their rights are, and what ‘magic words’ they can say to assert the law.
Here’s a video of it in action.
And another video explaining it (for you Portugese speakers!).
The name of the app is a play on ‘badge for good’. Just like a police man can flash their badge to assert their legal authority, a person can pull out this app and flash the words and legal citation to assert their rights.
You can save common scenarios, to have them at the ready.
It’s a great model — one that I am exploring replicating for here in the US. Putting the essential law in people’s hands — in easy to use and easy to understand modes. Let me know what you think!
In our Prototyping Access to Justice class, Kursat Ozenc and I are leading student teams to get quickly from speculating about how the courts could be improved to implementing new concepts.
In our class today, in week 3 of the course, we had the students make some more progress along the Journey of Prototypes.
The journey metaphor is useful to hep anyone who has an idea for how a system (like courts or self-help centers) could be better — but doesn’t know how to make forward progress on it. We are creating a staged set of prototypes to develop, to go from the spark of an idea to a vetted, feasible concept.
Last week, the students had digested their research into how the Self-Help centers currently function. From this, they made journey maps and spotted opportunity points for intervention. Then, they brainstormed 30 new concepts for each intervention-point.
For example, what are 30 new ways to make sure a person can find their way from the entrance of the court to the right office? Or, what are 30 new ways we can help people get service of process right, and not fail here?
This was the first stage of their Prototype Journey — one line ideas on a post-it.
This is the most basic capture of the idea — hard to even call it a prototype. But it’s the seed that starts to lay out what the ‘it’ is, that will guide the rest of the design cycle.
From the post-it, the next stop is the Concept Poster — a slightly more robust prototype. We had the students sort out all of their post-it ideas into a hierarchy, and choose the top 6 ideas they thought had promise to be breakthrough and feasible.
For each of these top 6, they drafted a Concept Poster version of the post-it’s concept, that added more details on functions, target users, high-level value, and implementation requirements. The Concept Posters were then compiled into a catalogue, of the Ideabook.
The value of the Idea Poster as a prototype is that it can let your team quickly, visually present a range of ideas to experts and users. They can almost go ‘shopping’ through the ideas and figure out which ones are most exciting, do-able, and worth pursuing. It can help the team whittle down further to the best one to pursue first, or to reorient based on this initial input.
The Concept Poster/Ideabook prototype can also be a check-in, with the testers letting the team know if similar ideas have been tried before, could be replicated from elsewhere, or if the team should be talking to certain experts.
Once the team gets Ideabook feedback, then they can focus in even further to the first idea they want to pursue. For this single idea, they will flesh it out to the next stage of prototype: the Storyboard.
They go from one sketch of the idea to a visual flow of the entire, ideal journey the user has with the new concept. It lays out the key steps of how the concept will work, what the user will have to do, what the system/service-provider will have to do, and what the resolution looks like. All of this is the ‘happy path’ version of an implementation, where everything goes right and works out.
Once the team documents this ideal flow, they then use the prototype to identify the key assumptions they’re making about the user, the service-provider, and the system. By laying out the step-by-step of the ideal, they can see what needs to happen or exist in order for this ideal to be realized. The prototype helps the team spot what they need to test.
From there, the team quickly moves to the next prototype mode: The Wizard of Oz version. For each of those assumptions they’ve discovered in their storyboard flow, they have to make a way to behaviorally test whether it will really work the way they expect it to.
A Wizard of Oz prototype is an interactive realization of the idea. The user is not just reacting to a presentation of an idea — she is playing around with the ‘app’, or moving around in the new ‘space’, or considering whether to visit a ‘website’. The design team does not actually build a functional new app, space or website — but they use paper, sketches, enactment, and other hacks to simulate the concept.
The value of this prototype is getting more realistic feedback, about whether people will really engage with the thing you’re creating, if they’ll be understand it, and if they’ll get value from it. You can test the many assumptions baked into it.
Some common Wizard of Oz versions of prototypes are making paper-sketches of apps and then assembling them into a click-through using a tool like Marvel. Or putting a sign-up sheet for a new service or organization, and seeing how many people sign up or take the ad. Or, manually acting out a new tech-based service.
Each of these prototypes will let the team count behavior: how many people sign up? How many people are able to use the app you’re envisioning? How many people click on an advertisement for a new service? How many people stop to look and use a new electronic sign you want to install?
It also is valuable for more formal organizations like the court, to do something temporary and non-permanent — to demonstrate what is possible without asking for a large commitment immediately. Rapid prototypes of new signs, worksheets, space layout, or tech can show value, get feedback, and build momentum without any budget requests or committee approvals.
After the Wizard of Oz prototype, the teams will continue on their journey to more refined, content-rich, and tech-enabled versions of their ideas. But these first four steps of the journey help them get quick input, vetting, and refinements to make sure they’re on a promising track and doing something that will resonate with their various stakeholders.
Could we build an application that would let a person, who receives a legal document or government document in the mail to:
- Scan it in, either through a mobile-photo-scanner, or a QR code on the document that makes it easy to capture into the app
- Figure out what the document says, in jargon-free language. It also would help you understand if it is valid, if it is really from the court or government. It could also tell you what consequences and process it refers to.
- There could be other services attached — like translating its content into another language, showing you online paths to respond to it, or letting you know what advocate could help you respond.
In Spring 2016, Margaret Hagan and Janet Martinez taught a course at Stanford Law School, through the Policy Lab program, called Prototyping Access to Justice: Designing New Legal Services for Self-Help (see the official class description on Stanford Law’s site here).
In partnership with the California Judicial Council and Self-Help Centers in San Mateo and Santa Clara County, we ran through several design cycles to document how self-help centers currently welcome, orient, and provide services to people without lawyers, who are going through civil law (mainly family law) to solve their problems.
On this page, we document our process and some of our initial learnings. We will be writing up a more formal report and paper with our results. In the meantime, we present this as a more informal write-up, with lots of images.
Our Process
We followed a human centered design process to explore what new solutions would be possible. This meant that we had half of our classes at the University, in a workshop or lecture seven, in which the students learned design methods and then practiced them in teams. The other half of the classes were in the field. Our team worked in the courthouse in Redwood City, where the San Mateo County Self Help Center is located. We interviewed the staff that works there. We ran through the process of trying to find the Self Help Center and use it. We observed people as they were going through the service and interacting with the Center’s resources and staff. We did design reviews of how information was being communicated and how service was being provided.
Scoping out our Challenge
In our first class, our team spoke with our partners in the court and California judicial council in order to understand their perspective. We were particularly interested in how they framed the problem that our class would be addressing. We also asked them about previous efforts to improve self-help centers, as well as the legal, budget, and staff constraints that self-help centers must operate within.
From these conversations, our team focused on a few questions to guide our research at the court. We would focus on how to improve the welcome and orientation experiences of people who come to the court building in order to find help for their family law problems. In addition to this initial stage of engagement, we would also consider the experience of understanding the legal process and trying to follow it.
Our class, with its limited time frame, would not explore later steps, like negotiations or mediation, or enforcement of court orders. It would also not address the process of attending hearings and being strategic about them. Rather, we limited ourselves to the initial stages of the person figuring out the court system and using self-help resources to get started on their process.
In California, many people with issues around divorce, child custody, child support, and guardianship, try to navigate the legal system on their own without a lawyer. Often they seek out help from the self-help center in order to do it themselves. They seek out help in person as well as online. Our research would focus on those coming in person to the building, but we would also consider how to adapt our proposals to an online context.
In addition, many of the litigants in California do not speak English as their first language. There are also major issues with literacy in general, and literacy of legal jargon, written in English, in particular. We decided to sideline these issues of language access temporarily, and focus on litigants who at least could read English at the grade school level or above. But we recognize that any of our solutions, to truly serve access to justice, would need to adapt to foreign languages easily, as well as to low literacy situations as well.
We entered into our next phase of user and system research, with a scope down vision of which types of users we would be designing for, and what parts of court user experience we would focus on. We would target people with English literacy who were starting off their family law court journey, and who chose to do so in person and not online.
Design Observations on site
We had three sessions in the court building and the self-help center to uncover problem areas, successes, and other needs and requirements for the people seeking out help for family law problems. During the sessions, we used a range of design research methods to understand the current Service design and user experience. These methods included observation, service safaris, interviews with users, interviews with staff and other professionals, and feedback sessions on sacrificial ideas. Using these methods, we were able to figure out more precisely how we could improve the user experience of the courts
We identified key touchpoints where the current Self-Help Center design was failing, and where it could be improved. They are as follows.
Target areas for user welcome and orientation to the court:
- Signage
- Names, Terms, Language
- Line and Triage
- Welcome Experience
- Physical Space
- Resources
- Directions
- Referrals
Target areas for navigation of the legal process:
- Filling in forms
- Understanding basics of process
- Knowing the detailed step-by-step
- Supporting Homework and Legwork outside of the Center
- Following through on the plan
Findings about our Target Users
Juicebox Gallery Id 27 has been deleted.
Signage isn’t supporting people
- people get lost
- people don’t read the signs, or after they read them, they go back to ask the security guard
- no one is staffing the information booth
- many signs outside the building, but with very different visual languages
- importance of entry way right before the metal detectors
- importance of after the metal detectors, that guard can refer to easily
- fail point of at the escalator, whether to go up or to go straight
- fail point of the self help center’s board that should be in the eyeline
- all signs in English
Names and Terms don’t signify what they’re supposed to
- importance of ‘start a divorce’ versus ‘help with a divorce’ — two different offices you might have to go to (clerk versus facilitator)
- different signs refer to center by different names
- clerk in office downstairs doesn’t consistently say same name
- people in the know say “Family Law Facilitator”, few people say Self-Help
- but confusion with “Family Law Facilitator” or “Family Law Services” or “Family Law Clerk”
- nothing feels ‘natural’
The Pain of the Line
- people don’t like waiting inside the actual center — too cramped, not private, really “feel the line”, anxious about making it through, it’s hot, it’s uncomfortable
- “The Line” experience sets off on a negative foot, the line-ness makes them angry at each other, feel length
- people don’t know what to expect, what they can get from here or not
- can’t prep beforehand, get a jump on the line through online or phone channels, need to show up and hope for the best
Where is the Welcome?
- feeling of confusion and lostness until they reach the center — undermines confidence, makes them feel lost
- feeling of intimidation, whether they can even enter the door of the Center
- Bulletin Board resources is not in their eyeline, often missed
- No strong signal that “you’ve arrived in the right place”
- not enough human people to guide — just the security guards
- clerks in office downstairs could be a valuable welcoming point, to direct people to the center, but they do not give clear or enthusiastic referrals to Center
The Physical Space’s discomfort and exposure
- Lack of privacy for very sensitive and confidential information about family problems
- Really tough if you have an infant or toddler who’s not potty trained
- Not enough chairs
- Not enough physical space to do the interviews
- Computers are not used (potentially should be removed completely?)
Lots of Resources, but not enough order to them
- Many scattered notices and resources, without clear labels about who they’re for, and what their value is
- Signs and resources are small, printed in too small a way
- Staff verbally give directions and support (like with clerks downstairs), but without knowing how much people actually take in
- Lots of next steps, hard to take in
- Physical directions to other offices or buildings are verbally described, hard to remember
Early stage Concepts
Juicebox Gallery Id 26 has been deleted.
As soon as we began this design cycle, we took note of any ideas that we had. Even though there is a designated part our work cycle in which we would do brainstorming, we acknowledge that good ideas pop up even when we are supposedly focused on other things, like observing the space or doing interviews. Anytime an idea was suggested to us or something triggered an idea in us, we jotted it down, and then did regular debriefs as a team to share these ideas.
Many of the ideas are very sketchy, without much detail or thought about implementation. But this large collection of concepts helped us to have a very productive brainstorm, and gave us a lot of material with which to pattern and then prioritize the concepts we felt were most promising take forward. We also used many of these early concepts as sacrificial prototypes/provocations, that we could show to our users or to court staff, and get their feedback as well as their additional ideas.
Iterated, improved designs
By our final presentation to our Court partners in May 2016, we had made some decisions about which ideas to prioritize as suggested pilots in the Self-Help Center. We combined some ideas, and we staged them from the most immediate and do-able, to the most ambitious and resource-demanding.
We’d also point back to a Guardianship/Court Design workshop that we ran two years ago. This previous workshop was focused on self-help guardianships, and produced a range of concept designs to help litigants through this particular family law procedure. Those ideas are listed out on our workshop page here. We noticed some overlap between those proposals and ours here.
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Creative research reels
Court user experience can be heavy sometimes due to the entangled nature of court use cases and structures. This past week, our course participants took that challenge and conducted research in the field with court employees, and end users. When they were preparing to present their findings, we asked them to think them as highlight reels of a motion picture.
The discussion during the presentations was rich, teams realized the interconnectedness of their design briefs, and why they should be collaborating more in the upcoming weeks. Teams did an excellent job highlighting the detailed issues in their selected scopes. Moreover, they identified some overarching challenges such as courts’ fairness principle, technology bottlenecks regarding vendors, and the importance of feedback loops. What also fascinated me was the medium of some of the presentations. Using enactment and blueprinting/mapping were two creative reporting methods that helped the audience to visualize the insights and the context.
I would like to share two of these creative reels ~research reportings from the session.
First one was from the team who picked the prior-to court design brief. Team decided to present their early research findings through enactment. They enacted three different personas, including all-in techie, all-offline persona, and a tech-friendly but busy persona. Choosing enactment as reporting research helped us the audience to grasp the personas and their daily lives more clearly.
The team who picked the inside the court experience presented their findings using a blueprint of the building on the whiteboard. Each member then presented their experience when they tried to use the service ( walk-in-the mile method) and referred to the blueprint when they were presenting their findings. Again, the medium of presentation made the research more lively than a dry powerpoint presentation.