Legaltech innovation aims to revolutionize the legal industry, which has typically been considered conservative and resistant to change. New ideas, products, and concepts being developed in the field are trying to simplify complex law processes and generate more affordable and engaging solutions for the end users.
The design represents a fundamental tool in promoting the changes that will benefit both lawyers, legal departments and individual consumers. A design-driven approach to problem-solving can lead to innovation and contribute to improving the legal system as a whole.
Design Thinking Meets the Legal Industry
In recent years, a great deal of work was done in applying methodologies that merge law, design, and technology. The , directed by has become a world-renowned center in the field, while other centers and projects developing research and teaching on legal innovation through design methods include the , and the .
The application of design thinking in the legal sector contributes to identifying new possibilities, enhancing the efficiency, user-friendliness, and usability of the legal products of the future. More than just a methodology, it is a framework that can be used to identify and solve problems.
Design thinking follows a cyclical flow with 3 major steps:
● Understanding the users and defining the problem.
● Exploring ideas that address user needs.
● Materializing the solution into real products.
The process can be described by following 6 phases: empathize, define, ideate, prototype, test, and implement. The whole process is iterative and cyclical, allowing and inviting team members to always come back to previous phases, as long as the product evolves.
Design thinking leverages the probability of success and the positive impact the products have over the users. For that reason, defining the real problem you are trying to solve is vital for the success of this methodology.
“A wonderful interface solving the wrong problem will fail.” Jakob Nielsen
Designing a New Justice
Imagining the legal services of the future is not easy, but we can start by asking the right questions: what do people need? What are the current points? How can we do it simpler and more efficient? Asking the right questions will take us to the root of the problem.
Empathy maps are a useful tool to explore and validate the data we have about the users. In particular, to understand user needs and behaviors in the early stages of the design process. Based on user personas, empathy maps explore four attitudinal aspects: what the user says, thinks, does, and feels.
Design Principles
When designing the user experience for a legal product, is important to follow some basic design principles:
● Consistency — Communicate with the users using one coherent language. Keep similar elements of the design with a consistent look, function, and feel.
● Simplicity — Simplify the UI, avoid distractions and unnecessary information. Keep clear and objective communication.
● Efficiency — Optimize workflows. Anticipate mistakes, and enhance the process of achieving the user goals, making users work faster, better, and smarter.
● Learnability — Make it fast and easy for new users to understand how to use the interfaces. Work to create intuitive experiences.
User Research and Data-Driven Decisions
User research helps gathering relevant data about the users, and the problem we are aiming to solve with design. Different research methods may be applied, depending on the aspects and the development stage of each product. A good approach is to mix qualitative with quantitative methods.
Qualitative methods, such as usability testing, contribute to identifying the factors that affect a specific area under investigation and are normally based on open-ended questions, observation, and user behavior. Examples of qualitative methods are:
● Usability testing.
● User interviews.
● Small-sample surveys.
● Ethnographic studies.
● Contextual inquiry.
● Focus groups.
Quantitative methods contribute to validating assumptions or hypotheses pointed out by qualitative research. It’s normally based on statistical data and metrics, helping to identify user preferences. Examples of quantitative methods are:
● A/B testing.
● Analytics.
● Large-sample surveys.
It’s also important to understand the difference between attitudinal and behavioral methods. Attitudinal relates to ‘what people say’, their stated beliefs, while behavioral relates to ‘what people do’, or how they interact with the product.
For the exploratory phase, we need to understand the personas and stakeholders on a deeper level, as well as the challenge we are trying to solve. Creating wireframes, low and high-fidelity prototypes are essential to validate the initial ideas the team comes up with and identify points of improvement as soon as possible.
Published at Thu, 23 May 2019 22:23:54 +0000
