These recommendations, adapted from Margaret D. Hagan’s “A Human-Centered Design Approach to Access to Justice: Generating New Prototypes and Hypotheses for Intervention to Make Courts User-Friendly,” include overarching principles for good legal help design and court practices that are more user centered. Please consider the following areas when presenting your example:
1. Courts must coordinate Navigable Pathways, which help people understand the whole sequence of events that will face them during their legal processes and more effectively assist them through that process.
2. People need more robust Wayfinding Tools to physically orient themselves and navigate through the court while also navigating bureaucratic procedures. People need more user-friendly signage in person and online to assist in this process.
3. When initially engaging with the legal system, people need warm and efficient welcome experiences to encourage them to follow through with the procedure and to give them confidence and dignity while doing so.
4. The court experience is defined by paperwork: forms, brochures, worksheets, motions, and more. Redesigning paperwork to be more visually clear, prioritized, and manageable can have a major improvement on people’s ability to use the system well.
5. Before people come to court, and in between their visits for assistance and hearings, there is an opportunity for them to complete legal tasks online. This article proposes the development of more online court tools that can help people prep for their court visits and get their tasks done correctly.
6. When in the court building, people need better work stations and materials to get their tasks accomplished so they can be prepared for the clerk and the judge.
7. Overall, the court system needs to develop a culture of usability testing and feedback in order to understand where there are fail points for the litigants, as well as negative and frustrating experiences or ideas for improvements.