Justice Innovation
Could we take the workshops that self-help centers already run in person, and make online versions of them to get wider distribution? To people who can’t travel to self-help centers or need it during weekends or evenings? If we package up the guides into more usable formats, we can help amplify their impact.
What if we made templated, user-tested Cover Sheets to all legal tasks (whether it’s filling out forms or going through a procedure) so that people have great introductions and orientations to the task before being asked to do it?
Inspired by the civic technology project CityVoice, that lets any person call up to leave a voice message about a problem they’re experiencing with their city government or infrastructure — can we provide a similar feedback loop in court and legal services?
What if people in the legal system had ways to give their feedback, so that the courts, lawyers, and other professionals could improve their services based on user experience metrics?
The metrics could be:
– comprehensibility
– accessibility
– ease of use
– sense of fairness
– positivity/negativity of experience
This is a simple feedback card — a piece of paper — from Uniqlo, a clothing store. Could we use these cards along with SMS text lines, phone voice lines, a visual ideas board, or other ways to gather user input into what their baseline current experience is, and what they would prefer.
At courts, at community centers, at libraries, at cafes — can we have interactive boards full of resources and services that people could access?
Using a large touch screen, a court or clinic could have a Triage screen, a Resources Screen, or a Directions Screen. People could come up to ask a question or find resources.
The person could jump to the most relevant content — making it a more personalized experience, and to have an interactive experience akin to a human-to-human one.
I’ve been playing around with small graphics to sum up some of the comments that the users have reported back. Here is one such visual:
In addition, at Legal Design Lab we have started a working group around this topic specifically. You can read about our process here, and our outcomes, standards, and work here.
I have been sketching out some possible templates for what a good one-pager worksheet would be, to guide a lay person through a legal process. The he one-pager has limits, so instead of thinking about it as a total ‘process guide’, I’m thinking of it more as an ‘orientation tool’ that gives the person their bearings in a legal area, with some key terminology, major red flags and warnings, and an overview of what to be doing.
As for composition, my thoughts have been to prioritize white space (not try to cram information on), use icons & faces as accents & markers on the page, and show priority through font size & spaces.
The header is also key — I’m thinking that along with the title of the procedure, the header can also give a ranking about how difficult the procedure will be. This could be a way to encourage the user not to do too much on their own, and seek out expert help while going through it.
A few weeks ago, when I logged into my browser, I got a notice from Google that they wanted to walk me through a Privacy Checkup of my Google Account. I agreed, more to observe how they treated me as a user & how they guided me through the experience of understanding my status quo & revising my options to be more in line with my preferences.
This kind of intervention could be useful for privacy interventions — but also for other ‘legal health checkups’. I am curious about how to attract people to pay more attention to possible legal remedies for their ‘life problems’ and then seek out help from lawyers, guides, software, etc. that could guide them towards being prepared & smart about the law.
So what was the Google Privacy Check-up intervention like? Here are the screenshots from it:
Even if I had not been analyzing this experience as a designer, I would have clicked on & completed this privacy check-up. It was easy to use, and it gave me interesting information about me (and like most people, I expect, it’s really interesting to learn more about me — or the alternate version of me that Google has compiled). Most importantly, it gave me a sense of choice and agency — I was able to tell Google what I wanted (within reason) and have them do it. That is a very satisfying accomplishment for a few minutes of clicking.
What are the takeaways for this when it comes to access to justice?
We could be doing compelling legal health check-ups just as we do privacy check-ups. Here’s a skeleton of the process:
That kind of service design could help loop people into taking care of their legal health — whether it’s making an estate plan or dealing with housing, employment, or financial problems they’re having.
Could we build a single portal to all kinds of legal support, help, counsel? If it’s a simple, memorable number that’s the same across the country — that would be terrific from a branding approach.
The LSC-TIG Summit last year listed centralized state-by-state legal portals as one of their central agenda items, and it would be terrific to see this happen.
What would an all-in-one collaboration platform look like, for clients & lawyers to work together? If there could be one place that coordinates a person’s journey from having a legal problem, to seeking help, to actually carrying through resolution of the problem — it could help reduce so many of the barriers to getting legal things done, and increase a person’s sense of control and empowerment.