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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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.
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.
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.
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:
Target areas for navigation of the legal process:
Juicebox Gallery Id 27 has been deleted.
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.
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.
In our interviews with experts and court professionals, we identified some of the core challenges and needs.
Here are some of the highlights:
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:
Many of the people fit into the following categories:
The goals of the Self Help Center and the Judicial Council are as follows:
The problems of the system are that it is:
The opportunities experts see are that:
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.
Could we remake the Self Help Center to be more colorful, friendly, and humanized?
This could be with more art on the wall, with more aesthetically and purposefully structured walls of resources. It could also have things for toddlers and other kids to focus on, so that they are focused, calm, and not distracting their parents and others.