Categories
Background

Why are government and court websites so bad?

I was delighted that one of my favorite new podcasts, Reply All, spent an episode in August all about horrible government websites (see Sam.gov as prime example 1) — and how they got that way.

why are govt websites so bad - open law lab

When we talk about terrible websites, it’s not just that they look like they’re from 1999 (though that’s definitely a part of it). It’s also that the processes are burdensome, unclear, and made even more so with bad web experience and interaction design.

The podcast goes into the regulatory environment around procurement and IT, that leads

  • to bad purchasing decisions (not enough young, cutting-edge vendors can make it through all the requirements and procedures to submit a bid),
  • to out-of-date tech (the yearslong lags between RFPs and roll-outs),
  • to dysfunctional govt-vendor relationships (not enough of the right kinds of requirements or metrics to actually lead to usable, useful sites — or to coordinate the many sub-contractors into a unified project).

All of it adds up to hugely expensive sites that are not usable for the target audiences, and that aren’t flexible enough to adapt to changing times’ standards of what good, trustworthy, engaging, confidence-inspiring websites look like.

This certainly isn’t just a federal government agency problem. The same bad-outdated-confusing website criticism applies to most every court website I have experienced.

Now my question is what kinds of regulations & organization structures need to be changed to get courts to make better purchasing decisions — that could make for more agile development processes, that mean more guarantees of interfaces & tools that the users can actually use, and that are flexible enough to stay current easily.

Categories
Background

What does a good Court Self-Help website look like?

Last summer, I started a design review of the California Judicial Council’s Self-Help webpage. It is meant to be a central hub for lay people in the state to find legal resources & referrals for their life problems. The goal is that the state court can provide a trustworthy & centralized hand-off to either local, court-sponsored Self-Help centers (where pro per litigants — without a lawyer — can get court lawyers’ help in figuring out the right forms to fill out, and how to fill them out) or to other legal bodies.

So what should this website look like? I’ve been sketching out some designs.

Self Help online presence design - Margaret Hagan

Here are some of the functions that the site should have:

For the Main Content

  • A bolder, graphic welcome & orientation message
  • Prominent, image based links to the most commonly clicked help pages
  • A 1-2-3 storyboard of how a lay person can use this site, what functions it will provide to them (and what the dominant flow through the site will be)
  • The full collection of resources organized into chunks, framed around lay people-terms of the ‘legal problem’, and each marked with their own icon (and a search/filter function at the top of this section of resources)

For the Sidebar

  • Very prominent search bar — with big text and set off with other bg color — and perhaps 300 px tall
  • En Espanol in larger text
  • Reframing the Librarian-chat in a more conversational way, with a sample question in gray
  • Reframing the map in a conversational way — around the question of “Where to find help”

Apart from these specific functions, I’ve also drawn up some more general User Experience/User Interface guidelines for those designing online legal portals, like this self-help site.

CHECKLIST 1: SIMPLICITY & GUIDANCE

Orient your user immediately as to what path they may want to take. Present a roadmap that orients them, that lets them see what you have on offer & where they may want to go. Anticipate what they will likely need & tell them the pathways to get the information & tools to get them there

Give relevant Entry Points to your site’s resources. Present scenarios or personas as entry points. First present the most basic possible pathways (likely, categorize the type of legal situation you’re dealing with, choose a ‘type of law’ path).

Build a Clear Hierarchy: Present information in a clear, thoughtful hierarchy. Only disclose what is necessary at that moment. When you do present it, make sure it is presented with clear logic & rationale.

Do not present long lists of resources. Present resources in categories based on answers to specific questions (how to solve this need? how to accomplish this task?). Do not present alphabetic lists. Categorize and group them. Present indexes based on how your user understands her problem, names her problem, categorizes her problem. That is not usually be the first letter of a term for the problem — a term she may not even know.

Stage information. Present very limited information in the first place, with a limited set of options that the user can pursue — and gradually uncover more specific, in-depth information she is seeking out. Have a comprehensive set of information on your site, but do not present it at first. Let the user unpack it if she wants it. Otherwise, give summaries, shortcuts, headlines, and other ways to digest main points without having to spend time reading through comprehensive explanations, lists, options, etc.

Be consistent, be familiar. At each step, have a consistent template of information you’re providing to them. Borrow these patterns from other dominant services and products in your area. Put your user at ease so they know what to expect, where to find things, how easily to scan & shortcut through your material.

Create a Dominant Flow-Pathway. Have a path of least resistance, especially for the new user and the naive user. They want to just flow through process in the quickest, least thoughtful way possible (the ‘No-Brainer’ mode). Make it easy to stay on path — don’t give lots of other options or pathways when they’re on a path. If most of your users are naive to the experience or content, then rein them in. Give them more of a single-use path, that lets them accomplish a task with very clear & strict direction from you.

Give Shortcuts: Especially for expert users, allow them to jump off your dominant flow-pathway. Give lots of shortcuts to find the right bit of information for the user who is coming to the site ‘with a bullet’. Right from the first page, let the user go to the Specific Tasks that she wants to accomplish, through a search box, an index, or a common-shortcut list. Don’t lock your user into the dominant-path. Do not make them feel trapped. Let the user ‘Off-Road’, wandering farther afield, to dive in more, to try things out, especially if they are in expert mode and want something very specific. Give these off-roaders the ability to undo, reverse, and go back to the home-path.

Use white space, do not crowd: space out all of the resources you are providing. Add icons and pictures to flag different categories, tasks, path-entry points. Do not crowd pages with lots of text and options.

CHECKLIST 2: USER-FRIENDLY CONTENT

  • Architect your resources into an integrated system. Take a step back to look at all the resources you want to offer to your users, and organize them into a coherent flow of content. Sort & categorize it, cut repetition, and find where you are missing resources that you need to collect.
  • Unbury your materials out of PDF and Word documents. When you are presenting legal documents, forms, resources, or otherwise to your user, present them whenever possible on your website, in html, and not as an attachment in another file format (most common culprits: the links to the .pdf download or the .doc download). Take it out of these other formats and lay it out into the flow of your site. If the material is meant to be filled in by the user ( like a form) or printed off (like a training manual) then give them the option to download the .pdf or .doc — but always present it live on your site first, and give the user a clear way to download it in the non-html format.
  • Only use the plainest of plain language. Rewrite your existing resources into terms that are meant for the layest of lay users, even when your target audience is very well-educated & familiar with law. Take out all jargon, or define it immediately & in simple terms if you must use jargon terms.
  • Make your knowledge visual, graphic, and easy to look at. When you can, transform your text into (or add to your text with) icons, photographs, diagrams, cartoons, and scenarios. Even putting a face on each page will help your user pay attention & relate to the content better. Particularly when you want a user to pay attention to a piece of content, put an image with it.
  • Convert long paragraphs into digestible formats. Big chunks of text will induce gloss-over & misunderstanding. Break them apart intelligently & strategically. Use as many checklists and bullet-points as possible, so that the user can designate individual steps and concerns easily.
  • Keep your content Up-To-Date & Correct. Do not let your information go to seed. Keep pruning. Remove resources that are out of date. Check back with contributors. Recruit new donations. Recruit updates. Users will tune out from your resource as a whole if even part of your resources contain faulty or irrelevant information.
  • Ensure your site is mobile-friendly. What does your site look like on a mobile phone? Make sure your site is responsive to the screen size, so the text & containers all change size for optimal phone experience!

CHECKLIST 3: INTERACTIVITY & RESPONSIVENESS

  • Allow for multiple modes of interaction. Give users multiple ways to get their intended task done, based on their user preferences. Like, some may want to browse to find the right thing and check it out; others may want to search through query to get right to an answer for their query.
  • Give rewards, sense of achievement. Let the user check things off, feel they have progressed, be rewarded by the interface for having got through material. Provide immediate reactions when a user has taken a step, so they know it has registered & they feel satisfied that it is done.
  • Make the possible interactions direct, clear & limited. Make it very clear to the user at each page/section/step what they should be doing— and what the effect of their actions will be. Give clear tips for each possible action the user might take. Give one screen per goal. Don’t crowd with too many functions or tasks, make it clear what the goal is.
  • Reduce the number of clicks. Let the user stay on the same page for as long as possible, but stage & selectively reveal/hide the information on the same page. Put in enough details for a person to know what they’re clicking on (don’t make them click for them to find out what will be at the link). You can use hover to give the details without a click. Also try to avoid too much scrolling, closing, clicking…
  • Once a user has made some choices, give Targeted & Bordered Resources. Once a person has chosen a certain pathway, then you know which specific area of your site that she wants to be in. Wall off the other resources on the sites from her, so that she doesn’t accidentally cross over into another area that doesn’t apply to her. She can come back to the home & restart her search if she wants to enter another area of resources.
  • Give Status Mechanisms to keep users aware. Tell your user if there’s been a failure, if conditions are changing, what the status of a process is, when things are being saved, what can be done/undone.
Categories
Background

Legal Innovation Blue Sky Agenda #ABAFutures

Legal Innovation Blue Sky Agenda
My sketches from this morning’s agenda-setting working group: what are the big challenges to legal innovation? What do we as a profession (and beyond) need to focus on to build a better 21st century legal system?
IMG_20150503_122545.725

IMG_20150503_122527.108

IMG_20150503_122519.189

IMG_20150503_122511.449

IMG_20150503_122503.382

IMG_20150503_122436.906

IMG_20150503_122448.383

IMG_20150503_122831.564

IMG_20150503_122817.778

IMG_20150503_122754.975

IMG_20150503_122741.288

IMG_20150503_122722.056

IMG_20150503_122638.192

IMG_20150503_122649.506

IMG_20150503_122622.013

IMG_20150503_122610.709

IMG_20150503_122558.852

Categories
Background

Why is getting help for legal problems such a labyrinth? #abafutures

image

A great, rousing talk from Bay Area Legal Aid executive director Alex Gulotta. Looking at legal help from a person’s perspectives.

Categories
Background

Tino Cellar on legal innovation

image

We are in a new era, shaped by technology  and globalization. How will we respond?
Judge Tino Cuellar’s challenge to the ABA.

Categories
Background

Using choice architecture for better legal services

I’ve been reading a bunch of behavioral economics texts & taking notes on how it all might be made useful for legal services design.

Here are some of my sketched notes from while reading Nudge by Cass Sunstein & Richard Thaler, and then another article by Richard Thaler & Will Tucker in Harvard Business Review on Smarter Information, Smarter Consumers.

Wise Design - behavioral economics for legal services design

Wise Design - behavioral economics for legal services design

Wise Design - behavioral economics for legal services design

Wise Design - behavioral economics for legal services design

Wise Design - behavioral economics for legal services design

Wise Design - behavioral economics for legal services design

Categories
Background

An Agenda for Next Generation Legal Services

Next Generation Legal Services for access to justice an agenda

In the world of access to justice, consumer law, and even big law services, we need to think more clearly about what kinds of new products and services we should be developing. Rather than being reactive or tech-driven, we should begin with what lay people want & need to do (these are the functions we should be providing them), and what preferences they have for learning information and taking action (these are the interfaces we should be delivering the functions through).

I’ve been running a host of workshops, design sprints, and hackathons to generate these new concepts and then to test them — which kind of legal products and services have enough promise to pursue?

Margaret Hagan - legal design exploratory events

From these exploratory events, and from user-testing for projects that I’ve been developing, I’ve seen patterns of what lay people want from legal services & what kind of interfaces they want to use.

There are three types of legal products/services that we (in the world of legal innovation) need to be focusing our development efforts:

  1. Better Portals for Legal Services
  2. Process Navigator Tools
  3. Decision-Making Tools

There are plenty of other categories of tools for development later — from quality checks, to intake of client data. Other categories have lots of work going into them right now — how to assemble documents together, how to match people with lawyers.  But these three categories I’ve listed above — these are the families of products and services that users are showing high need for, and that we’re not currently working (enough) on.

Margaret Hagan - Next Generation of Legal Services - Open Law Lab - Slide058

 

Next Generation Legal Services - better legal help portals

Better Portals are online & offline entry points for legal help. This could be (one of my pet projects) a Google Search intervention, that catches legal-ish queries that a user enters into the search box, and then directs the user to good, quality, if not public & jurisdiction-specific legal resources. Or it could be real-world, situational entry-points — places in people’s everyday lives (in libraries, schools, hospitals, main streets) that allow them to get legal help in situations when they need it.

We as the legal community need to build a new set of on-ramps for people with problems to realize there can be legal relief for their ‘life problems’. And to be quality, engaging on-ramps, we need to find those touchpoints where people are open to seeking out legal help, and their preferred modes of doing so.

Next Generation Legal Services - legal Process Navigators

Process Navigator Tools are products or services that can guide a lay person (or even a novice lawyer) step-by-step through a legal matter. As the category title implies, it’s about taking a process-based view of how legal tasks can get done. We must break the procedures down into a concrete sequence of steps, and then for each step we give granular, plain English, visual guidance for how to get it done.

This kind of development work means exploding the usual ways we as lawyers convey legal guidance. No more static PDFs, no more hour long power point webinars, no more overly short & generic appetizer article about do’s & don’ts. Rather, we need a comprehensive & staged, thorough & interactive process navigator, that will lead a person through every nitty-gritty detail of getting a legal process done but do it in a responsive, smart, companion-like way.

It should be written in Plain language, it should allow a user to check tasks off, set reminders for others, save her progress, share her info & have it saved into the navigator, complete her forms and tasks on the platform, and generally be her all-in-one guide to getting this task done.

It should be like an expert paralegal, or court navigator, plus personal assistant to help a person complete all the steps of a legal procedure without missing paperwork, deadlines, or crucial small details. It should also help the person form an accurate timeline & workload expectation from the outset of a legal process, so she has a more transparent view of what’s coming & what she should be doing.

Next Generation Legal Services - Decision Making TOols

Decision Making Tools are interactive, customizable ways for a person to figure out how taking a certain action might play out. They allow a person to enter in her personal data (or an imagined version of it) and her preferences, and then it shows her potential outcomes that may result from different legal paths.

The value of these tools is in helping people to think through many scenarios, weigh their options, and see more long-term outcomes. One of the main barriers lay people express as they consider whether & how to engage legal help is ‘not knowing what I don’t know’ and ‘not being able to think through all the possible options’. People routinely express that they don’t want to pursue a legal course of action, because they’re not sure if it is comparatively the best fit for their situation & their goals.

Can we in the legal community build better tools, interventions, services that help people envision what consequences (short & long term, legal and otherwise) might result from different legal paths they take? Even if these envisionings aren’t perfectly accurate, if they help a person get a better overview of ‘what they don’t know they don’t know’ and start to play around with their preferences & resulting scenarios — they can go a long way in encouraging smarter decision-making.


 

These three camps of new products & services — better portals, process-based navigators, and decision-making tools — should be at the top of the agenda when we in the legal innovation community talk about providing better access to legal services. There is a need for each of these functions, if we are going to get people to realize that there are legal remedies for their life problems, and get them empowered to comprehend how they can get legal relief and how to choose the right path to pursue.

In later posts, I will show concept proposals, as well as examples and borrowed patterns, for each of these three product families. For now, the goal is merely to set these product families as an agenda for innovation. We need a more focused plan for how we are going to build better access to justice & legal user experience — these are three very needed & high-value targets for us to focus our innovative energy.

 

Categories
Background

Access to Justice ideabook

From my notebook, sketches from a brainstorm around what possible models for access to justice initiatives might be.
Access to Justice Ideabook 1 - Margaret Hagan Access to Justice Ideabook 2 - Margaret Hagan

Categories
Background

Could we build an Open Source Legal Software Hub

9a98edd9c3ed58d0172f3fdf65b3bfad

One item on my ever-growing Access to Justice agenda is an online hub full of worthy software solutions for legal organizations to use. Ideally, with software that is affordable if not free — and designed to be easily updated & changed. As opposed to software that is proprietary to one company, who, after they sell it to a court or a legal aid group, continues to extract money from them for updating and adapting the software.

Such a hub could set best practices for what tech legal organizations should be deploying. It could guide non-techies as to the essential categories of tech they should be using to manage their cases, interact with clients, and promote efficient and satisfying workflows inside the org. And it could house advice, tutorials, and support for how to use these tools well.

Actually setting up such a hub is not that difficult — just a matter of a website and then some initial content curation:

  • what the essential tech categories should be,
  • what the examples of free or low-priced tech options are, and
  • some guidance as to how to use these.

What’s more challenging is getting the brand of the site elevated enough to reach all of the courts & legal aid groups that need this guidance. Building awareness and engagement — so that the users can find it and then trust it enough to follow through with its resources — that’s a harder undertaking.

Categories
Background

How do people use the Internet for legal services?

I have been working over the past few months on a research paper about how people use the Internet for legal help. I’ve been doing online questionnaires to develop insights into who legal users are — what a core typology of user types are, what their mental models are when searching for legal help for a problem in their lives, and what their preferences are for how to find and comprehend legal help.

I’ve followed those up with task analyses — having users use different legal websites to try to find information & see how they fare and react to various types of website designs.

Though writing is taking me longer than I wish it would, the results are truly fascinating & I’m excited to get them published in the near future. In the meanwhile, here are some of my notebook sketches from my initial plans of what my study would look like.

How do people use the Internet for legal services?How do people use the Internet for legal services? How do people use the Internet for legal services?

If you’re also interested in this topic, or have reading suggestions or thoughts for me — pass them along!