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Final report from Prototyping Access to Justice: 7 prototypes to make courts more user-friendly

Last Friday was the final class in the Stanford Law School/d.school class Prototyping Access to Justice. Kursat Ozenc and I were teaching the course as a practical, service design effort.


The big question guiding the work: if hundreds of thousands of Californians go to the courts to deal with their divorce, child custody, debt, and housing problems — how can we make the courts work for them, on their own terms? We know that growing numbers of people are trying to use the courts without a lawyer, but that the courts have been designed for lawyers — with complex procedure and intimidating jargon is so complicated that only lawyers can really figure it out.

Students were given initial design briefs that we had crafted from our earlier research into California Courts’ Self Help Centers last year. In the first version of this class, we followed litigants through their court journeys and interviewed professionals to identify key opportunities and breakdown points.

This quarter’s classes aimed to use this groundwork to jump more quickly into prototyping and testing. Each of the design teams worked on site at San Mateo County or Santa Clara County courthouses, and at the Stanford d.school labs — going through 3 cycles of scoping out a concept design, making a prototype of it, and testing it with many different stakeholders.

We ended up with seven proposals for the courts to pilot. Two concerned how to remake the court building and design of physical space. Two were new modes of guides, to present better ways to guide litigants through complicated tasks. One was about better form completion. One was about new modes for court feedback. And one was about better preparing court users before they come to court for the first time.

The teams made videos, maps, and presentations to capture their proposals, and we present them here for you to review. We ask you for your feedback now — because we are vetting these seven proposals to decide which to continue working on and possibly pilot with the courts.

1. Redesign of the Court Building: Visual Lines + Signs for Empowered Wayfinding

Team Chuka Ryori were tasked with helping people just as they arrived at the court the first time. How could we make people feel more supported, less confused and intimidated, and more capable of getting through the process efficiently?

Visual Wayfinding in Courts from Margaret Hagan on Vimeo.

Their proposal is to launch a coordinated, color-coded, pictogram-based wayfinding system in the court building. There should be color paths on the floor for the most common user destinations, with pictograms and a palette that supports finding the right place.

They did guerrilla-design work, by “decorating” the actual court with new lines, signs and pictograms to test how users reacted. The results were overwhelmingly positive. Our next steps are to refine the color palette and pictograms, and then work with the court to implement the new lines and signs.

2. Redesign of the Court Building: Respectful, Transparent Line Waiting

Team Golden Design Warrior was focused on the next moment in the user’s journey, when a person found the Self Help Center, but now must deal with the long and confusing wait to get services. After several different ideas to change the layout of the space, the team moved to focus on how to set up lines that gave users greater transparency and more comfort while waiting to be served.

New Line Waiting Design in Courts from Margaret Hagan on Vimeo.

The team identified that people were rushing to wait in a confusing line. They were stressed out, and in turn stressing out the staff who felt as if they had to barricade themselves in against a huge amount of people who wanted things from them. The goal of the system is to give people a clear ticket that would give them an explicit place in line, and would let them relax, sit down, and see when they could expect to be served.

The first pilot is just with laminated cards and a person distributing them near the entrance. Then it can be scaled to an automated ticketing service.


This prototype has tested remarkably well with both litigants and professionals, reducing both stakeholders’ stress and giving them more of a sense of control. With the simple intake during the sign-up, the professionals can better prep for the clients’ cases. They also get insulated from the pressure of a huge group of people hovering around their doors.

The joy of this design is how a simple service intervention can have a huge experiential payoff — making the experience of visiting court or working there be less anxious, confusing, and stressful.

3. Visual Book Guide to Following a Legal Process

Instead of worksheets and forms, or instructions told out loud before a person leaves the Center, how do we convey instructions and guidance to them? How do we make it easier for them to follow the procedure, so they stay on track and get it all completed correctly and on time?

Team Jiffy Justice proposes a visual booklet, that gives people a step-by-step map of what the process will look like, what to do, and how exactly to finish the steps. It’s about envisioning, modeling, and taking legal actions out of abstract text language, and into clear, grounded situations.

My Court Case Guide for self represented litigants from Margaret Hagan on Vimeo.

The team made a map that can be printed as a poster, a handout, or part of the book. It gives the systems-level view of the case. People liked this as an orientation material, but still wanted more detail about exactly what each of these steps entails. A high-level view helps give a person the mental model of the system, but they want to dig into more specific instructions and strategies.


The team made the booklet to enhance the guide, to go from the map to the detailed instructions.

They built it specifically so it could be easily printed on common paper sizes by the Self Help Center. It incorporates the map, but then with details of the forms, the filing info, and common flags and warnings.

The next, scaled-up version of this would be a digital version (most likely on mobile) that has the step-by-step guidance and the map for the person to follow along as they go through the process.

4. Text-based coaching through complicated process

Team Exit took this same challenge — how to help people through complicated procedures that they often fail at? Their proposal is more tech-centered, harnessing the power of the mobile phone. They created a prototype of the RemindMe Text system, in which litigants would get coaching reminders, customized due dates, and clear blasts of instructions about what to do to serve process (a particularly thorny part of a process, that people often screw up).

Court Text Messaging Project: RemindMe Text from Margaret Hagan on Vimeo.

The team embraced the principle of staging information and providing it at the right moment and context. Rather than give huge worksheets with general information all at once, segment it into specific messages and customize it with the user’s own information.

This program could later incorporate other kinds of messages, beyond reminders — including the maps and visuals that Team Jiffy Justice had in their booklets, or the wayfinding and prep materials that other teams proposed.

The great part of this proposal is that the text message channel, opened up between the courts and the litigants, can allow for a diversity of services to be provided in the future. As more technology is developed for court services, they can be integrated into this same channel.

5. Prep People Before Court with Warnings and Key Info

Even before people come to court, how do we make sure they come prepared to make the most of the day — and not waste it? Especially if it takes several hours to even get to speak to someone at court, how do we make sure people come with the paper, translators, and knowledge enough to get their tasks accomplished?

PrepMe: Pre-Court Information Strategy from Margaret Hagan on Vimeo.

PrepMe is an idea to do better outreach around this Prep information, via websites, mobile apps, and other court materials. It should be in multiple languages, and show very prominently the most common prep information people don’t know: about translators, child care, and timings.

This information can be presented also in court correspondence, posters, fliers, and any other ‘touchpoint’ where people are thinking about using the court system and planning for how to do it.

It prioritizes language access as a fundamental principle of design of court information, rather than as an add-on afterthought.

6. Help People Fill in Forms Better

One of the big failpoints in the legal process is the correct completion of forms. Team Remind proposed two prototypes — one paper-based, the other tech-enabled for improving litigants’ ability to complete Service of Process forms.

The paper-based system involves tagging up and creating a model completed form, that would guide a person through exactly how to follow this model.

The tech-based guide uses a Google Doc form to let people enter in the key data points, and then uses Python to fill in the form with this data. The litigant (or the process-server) never needs to see the Judicial Council form except when they print and file it. The Python script does the completion for them.

The vision of this prototype is to have a 2-pronged tech/paper strategy, so that resources are allocated to different types of users in the system. It is also to come up with cheap hacks to use the power of technology. Rather than contract with an expensive, proprietary vendor to provide for form-filling, the goal here is to mash together existing, modern, mobile-friendly services (like Google Docs) to get a very cheap and quick working system of filling in forms.

The other big insight here was in the power of having an interdisciplinary team, with lawyers and computer scientists working together to find the most strategic uses of technology that would serve the legal system. Lawyers should know the power of Python — a major takeaway for our partners.

7. Gather user input and experiences to feed back to the Courts

Team Law4U drafted a prototype of a kiosk in the Self Help Center’s office, that would ask simple questions from people as they’re waiting to get service. They’d be able to rate the court’s quality of service and give ideas for improvements.

Feedback systems for Courts from Margaret Hagan on Vimeo.

In the future, this program could also recruit litigants to join a Standing User Testing panel, in which they’d be compensated for reviewing new court efforts or giving more feedback to the courts. This would feed into a broader culture of testing and experimentation in the system.

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These seven prototypes are the result of 9 weeks of hard, creative work by our Prototyping Access to Justice class. Many thanks to the wonderful students and coaches!

We are soliciting feedback now on these prototypes, so that we can then proceed to pilot implementations of some of them in the courts. Let us know what you think!

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Class Blog Design Research

Drawing of a Housing Court waiting room

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.

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Class Blog Design Research

Designing a more user-friendly legal system: notes from the field

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.

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Class Blog

The Prototype Journey, from post it to wizard of oz

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.

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Class Blog Design Research

Summary of Spring 2016 class findings on Self Help Centers

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.

prototyping-access-to-justice-class-poster

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:

  1. Signage
  2. Names, Terms, Language
  3. Line and Triage
  4. Welcome Experience
  5. Physical Space
  6. Resources
  7. Directions
  8. Referrals

Target areas for navigation of the legal process:

  1. Filling in forms
  2. Understanding basics of process
  3. Knowing the detailed step-by-step
  4. Supporting Homework and Legwork outside of the Center
  5. 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. 

 

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Class Blog Design Research

Common Problems of people in the civil legal system

Talking to the experts in the court system, we heard what some of the most wicked, common problems are for people — the common places that they fail in getting to a good resolution.

  • It’s very hard to finish a divorce case. Even if you get it started, and do many of the tasks, divorce’s don’t just “finish themselves” once a party starts them. The case can go in so many directions, depending on what your spouse does in response to your filing for divorce. In legal terms, this is about “finalizing case to judgment.”
  • When court experts try to tell people about the many possible ways to finish a divorce, it’s overwhelming for the person. There are so many possible outcomes and path, it’s like a fire hose of information.
  • Serving process is very hard. It’s a step that people have to do on their own, after they’ve left the Self Help Center and the assistance there. Completing the forms and following the procedure is very tough. There are so many requirements.
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Class Blog Design Research

Self Help Center essential research

In our interviews with experts and court professionals, we identified some of the core challenges and needs.

Here are some of the highlights:

  • More and more people are coming to the civil court system without a lawyer
  • Judges, clerks, and other court professionals have an obligation to be neutral, but they also must serve these people without lawyers
  • Many of these court professionals are trying to figure out ways that they can be supportive and warm to users, without biasing the system towards them. They don’t want to be totally passive, but they don’t want to be hyperactive in support.
  • They try to help people present the facts clearly, so that the story of what’s going on is clear — so the justice system can work well
  • People can’t figure out how to present their facts and issues on their own — they need assistance to do this

We also heard some core needs and constraints, the “lay of the land” of how the systems work and what dynamics are going on.

About Self Help Centers as a thing:

  • They are run at Courts, on site
  • They are led by a lawyer as a managing director, with support from other attorneys, non-attorneys, and Justice Corps volunteers
  • They must be Neutral
  • They are not the lawyers of the people who come in. There is no confidentiality or other features of an attorney-client relationship
  • They can’t go into court with the person

Many of the people fit into the following categories:

  • they’re employed
  • they make less than $3000 a month
  • many are Spanish-speaking, or don’t have English as their first language
  • many are not of White background
  • many are being referred by word of mouth, clerks, judges, forms, or the website
  • they come seeking “some legal help”
  • then they return for follow-up checks and support — typically there are three visits in family cases.

The goals of the Self Help Center and the Judicial Council are as follows:

  • They want to identify systemic problems they can fix
  • They want to build partnerships and coalitions to enhance the center
  • They want to get beyond just helping the person get the paperwork right — but also improve negotiation and strategy skills
  • They want to figure out ways to make a wider continuum of services available, from lawyers to non-lawyers to tech services

The problems of the system are that it is:

  • designed for lawyers
  • there are very complex choices, because of how the law is structured
  • the forms are made for people with lawyers
  • there is a wide variety of people coming in for service

The opportunities experts see are that:

  • we can use technology, online services, and off-site services
  • we promote more listening and respect for people
  • we give more guidance and navigation
  • we help people advocate for themselves when they are before the judge, so they can make better use of hearings
  • we can identify and redirect complex cases (about 20% of the cases)
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Class Blog Design Research

User situations in Self Help Centers

As we have been researching the status quo situation of the Self Help Centers, we’ve identified some common types of users. They are as follows.

People with their kids, stressed and overwhelmed. They either can’t get child care, or brought them hoping to use court child care, but couldn’t because of the age/potty-training requirements

People who are stressed, anxious, and overfilled with emotion because of the life problem they’re in.

People with mental health problems that affect their ability to focus and navigate in the court setting.

People with very limited English proficiency, who don’t feel comfortable with legal English procedures and paperwork.

People, especially children and youth, who are serving as navigators for an adult, who have a language issue or mental capacity issue, that keeps them from being able to navigate themselves.

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These are not all the user types, but some of the ones with the most pressing needs that we saw at various Self Help Centers.

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Class Blog

Our big guiding design briefs

After our first two classes, we began to identify some of the big questions that characterize how the court needs to improve. We decided to segment based on where the person is in their journey through the system. Each brief focuses on a different moment.

We are going to use these design briefs to frame our new Winter Quarter class. Each of the briefs correspond to a particular stage of the typical user’s journey through the civil legal system. The teams will work to craft new interventions for each of these points, but then also coordinate with each other so their new solutions will provide for a cohesive experience.