Category: System Evaluation

Categories
Reading System Evaluation

NCSC User Testing Toolkit

The Access to Justice team at the National Center for State Courts has a new User Testing Toolkit out. It can help courts and their partners get user feedback on key papers, services, and tools, like:

  • Court Forms: are they understandable and actionable?
  • Self-Help Materials: can litigants find and engage with them effectively?
  • Court Websites: are they discoverable, accessible, and useful?
  • Efiling Systems: are they easy to use, and to get right the first time?
  • Signage and Wayfinding: can people easily find their way around in-person and digital court spaces, with dignity?
  • Accessibility: are the courts physical and digital platforms sufficiently easy to use for all different kinds of people?

The toolkit has background guidance on user testing, strategies for planning testing sessions, and example materials to use in planning, recruitment, facilitation, and analysis.

See more:

G. Vazquez, Z. Zarnow. User Testing Toolkit: Improving Court Usability and Access: A Toolkit for Inclusive and Effective User
Testing, Version 1. [Williamsburg, VA: The National Center for State Courts, 2024]: https://www.ncsc.org/__data/assets/pdf_file/0012/104124/User-Testing-Toolkit.pdf

Categories
System Evaluation

Measuring impact of legal help websites

At the LSC ITC conference 2023, the legal help website People’s Law School in British Columbia, Canada shared their strategy to measure what works on their website.


They were motivated by knowing ‘What works?” They want to know if the website is making a difference or not. Did they help people who were seeking guidance and assistance with their problems?

They did this by asking discrete, one-off questions throughout their website.

  • Is this helpful?
  • Will this help you resolve your issue?
  • Would you recommend this to others?

These questions usually had five star rating scales. In addition, there were free text boxes. The data was then saved into a database and presented as a data dashboard.

The website administrators could then see rates around empowerment, satisfaction, net promoter score, and suggestion and comments.

The data dashboard would be a driver of regular iterations and improvements.

Categories
Ideabook System Evaluation

TSA Feedback service design at Dulles Airport

More analogous learning from airports, this time from Dulles — and all their feedback prompts and props right around the security experience. These are all posted around the TSA, for people who have just gone through their pre-flight screening, to get feedback on the experience.

Categories
Ideabook System Evaluation

Public feedback report displays in courts

I took a photograph of this display in London Heathrow Airport, Terminal 5. It is a very public display of the customer feedback for the airport. It has the results of surveys for different factors of the airport experience, displayed right on the monitors that show flight times and other important information.

Categories
Current Projects System Evaluation

Design Review Sheet for the legal system

We use this one-page Evaluation sheet to review a service, product, or idea. It prioritizes the user’s point of view — to make sure that the thing you’re reviewing has a good user experience. It can be used for proposals or existing things.

The sheet forces the reviewer to give a number on each factor, but the main thing is not a score-card, but thinking through where there is opportunity to better match the thing with the user’s needs and aspirations.

Categories
Ideabook System Evaluation

Happy/Not Happy card

A model for feedback is the Happy/Not Happy card, a simple folded card that gives the user two sets of things to do to give feedback. It comes from a headphone company, Anker. They include this card with their product, to give a very clear set of steps to follow up with feedback.

Categories
Current Projects System Evaluation

CourtMD self-audit for courts

Court MD is a project from the National Center for State Courts that lets court admins run an audit of their own organization, to figure out what’s going wrong and where they should focus resources.

Here’s the description from NCSC:

…start with CourtMD, a new and improved online diagnostic tool from NCSC that can help zero in on your court’s most likely problems — In a matter of minutes.

…

This new and improved version of CourtMD contains significant updates and enhancements to enable court managers and staff to get quick answers to what may be ailing their court.

New topics covered include:

caseflow management;
records management;
staff satisfaction;
customer satisfaction;
and enterprise management.

CourtMD analyzes the answers you provide to a series of simple questions and then assesses the likelihood that your court is suffering from a particular pain point.

From there, you receive a printed summary, pointers on recommended reading, and where to go for more assistance.

Categories
Ideabook System Evaluation

Legal Rapid Prototyping Core team

What if we had on-site teams that could quickly spot problems, create an intervention, test it, and improve on it — all in one day or less, to make a great new design that actually works and is meaningful to the stakeholders (say, in a legal clinic, self help center, or court).

Rapid Prototyping design

Ideally this team would have design, research, and development skills on it, and could quickly build and implement promising new solutions.

Categories
Ideabook System Evaluation

100% Justice Brigade

100% Justice Brigade

What if we had a new Legal Organization — the 100% Justice Brigade — that was all about using design skills to create better services for laypeople. Clearer signage, maps, guides, communications — and full blown new services too!

100% Justice Brigade

Categories
Ideabook System Evaluation

CourtVoice Feedback Line

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?

Cityvoice - feedback to government