Simplifying the legal process to help defendants navigate their court cases
Many defendants lack awareness of legal proceedings due to the complex nature of the legal system. This lack of transparency affects court appearance and defendant case outcomes.
CourtChat keeps defendants informed through simple, timely text messages explaining updates to their court cases.
CourtChat keeps defendants informed through simple, timely text messages explaining updates to their court cases.
I was the founding product designer, where I led product discovery, ideation and design, and eventually managed the technical implementation of the MVP (see implementation project).
Input from legal practitioners and defendants was a critical component of our design process, ensuring our solution aligned with the context of a defendant’s experience.
Input from legal practitioners and defendants was a critical component of our design process, ensuring our solution aligned with the context of a defendant’s experience.
Paul Gehrig, Product & Design
Cait Kennedy, Fundraising & Sales
Theory & Principle, Engineering
Defendants lack basic information about their court cases
Court-appointed attorneys are overworked
Defendants miss court dates and misunderstand terms, leading to lifelong consequences
Hypothesis
Informed defendants will navigate the system more effectively
Qualitative research has demonstrated that defendants are more likely to appear in court when they have higher trust and perceptions of procedural justice and know what to expect.
Court date reminders
Legal explainers
Feel informed and prepared
Attend court dates
Better case outcomes
How might we improve defendants’ feelings of preparation for their court cases?
Defendants feelings of preparation
Court appearance
Approach
Content
Which details should be included and how should they be organized?
Context
When and where might people be receiving this information?
Delivery
Which method is effective and allows for easy iteration?
Which content characteristics are most important to defendants?
We conducted a closed card sort to understand defendants’ priorities regarding the structure and characteristics of case information.
Results
1. Easy to understand
2. On-time
3. Accurate
2. On-time
3. Accurate
When will defendants need information and in what context?
We partnered with students at Cleveland State Marshall College of Law and public defenders to create process maps illustrating a defendant's journey during pretrial.
Results
We found that defendants are more likely to face ambiguous and confusing situations early in their cases.
How to deliver information in a way that aligns with defendants' expectations and context?
We designed a usability test to examine the tradeoffs between the two most promising concepts: web app and texting service.
Results
A web app is better for long-term usability but more costly to develop and adjust. Texting is cheaper to set up and allows us to quickly iterate and identify optimal content and interaction models.
CourtChat, a texting service that informs and educates defendants on upcoming case events to help them navigate the legal process
Accessible
Texting is almost universally used and understood.
Cost-effective
Texting is cheap to set up, and you don't need to create, build, and maintain a UI.
Flexible
We can easily test and adjust different types of content and interaction models to see how they affect key performance metrics.
