(Even if we should be moving away from forms altogether…)

By Margaret Hagan. (This piece was originally published on our Legal Design & Innovation publication).

I am thinking a lot about forms these days! At the Stanford Filing Fairness Project, our team is working on a near future in which PDF forms no longer are key to people’s access to the court system. In that vision, it’s all about moving from populating PDFs to gathering data fields and sending them straight from a user-friendly website to the court’s case management system. No PDF forms needed!

But we still live in a justice system full of PDF forms. Even when software exists to help people fill in forms, through logic trees and document assembly programs, still it’s all going through PDFs.

So… if we still have to live in a world of PDF forms, let’s make sure that this world is as accessible & empowering to as many people as possible. We still need to care about the design of PDF forms.

The Basics of Good Court Form Design

This morning I had the privilege to kick off the National Center for State Courts summertime webinar series: Forms Camp. Over 750 attendees showed up to learn how to design better court forms. Usually, I think of court form design as a super-specialized, design geek kind of topic. But it turns out that a lot of people are unhappy with their current form design, and want to make them better.

So what should you to design better forms? I had 3 main areas for work:

1. Shift your form team’s point of view, from the institution-centered perspective to a people-centered perspective.
2. Follow key visual design principles — as well as good court form design principles that I proposed, based on the Legal Design Lab’s work.
3. Get started on a design process — in which multi-stakeholder groups, including community members, visual designers, lawyers, court staff, and others are reviewing current forms, sketching out new drafts, testing these prototypes, and finalizing the most successful ones.

1. Shifting from Institution-Centered Forms to People-Centered Forms

To really design a better court form, we need to shift from an institutional perspective to a user’s perspective. In particular, we really need to think of the end-user, the litigant who has a PDF or a digital pdf, is trying to deal with some kind of civil justice problem, and now has to use this form document to get their stories and choices into the court.

This user point of view is different than the institutional one — which is usually a ‘forms committee’ point of view. There the POV is about trying to put as many of the legal requirements in a PDF document, covering all possible use cases, and getting this document passed through a series of judicial committees and approval structures as quickly as possible.

Once we start looking at the court form from the user’s POV, we can see how important the humble form is to big lofty issues of access to justice, procedural fairness, and social policy. We also can set some better metrics & indicators by which to measure whether a form is successful or not.

Moving to People-Centered Measures of Forms

At the highest level, a successful form will increase a person’s access to justice. It will increase the litigant’s procedural justice & substantive justice.

It will make a person feel that the court process is transparent, fair, and trustworthy. (That’s procedural justice).

It will let them share their info, perspective, & experiences so that the judge can make a fair decision, applying the law to the situation in a just way. (That’s the substantive justice).

So how do we get to a form that increases access to justice?

At the intermediate level, a successful form will be useful, usable, and engaging to litigants. A litigant should be able to find & use it easily. They would find it useful, to get their key info across & prepare for court. And it would engage them, so they want to spend time & resources filling it in. These are all core principles of user-centered design in all realms — applied here to the specific court form scenario.

If we are going to define a court form’s key performance indicators (or, KPIs for acronym fans), we make these KPIs as a user-centered list. We put litigants first — since the justice system is meant to serve the public. We also include court staff and leadership as secondary users as well, since we know that they are users of forms, too. To make a good form, we need to track indicators for both litigants & staff.

Setting up these metrics and indicators is key to getting the first part of forms design right. We need to know what we’re aiming to achieve. Once we have user-centered metrics and indicators in place, we make sure all our design and legal work is oriented in the right direction.

2. Follow Visual & Court Form Design Principles

So, then how do we make it more likely that litigants will engage with these forms, use them easily & correctly, and find value in filling them out? That’s where design principles come in.

I presented two sets of guiding principles for court form designers to follow. The first are general graphic or visual design principles, that have been honed over the years in various (non-legal) fields. The second are court-form-specific principles that I distilled from the past decade of working on legal design at Stanford.

If you want to get more into very detailed communication design choices (like font, color, and accessibility) there are more resources on general visual design rules here:

• The US Govt’s Accessibility for Visual Designers, https://accessibility.digital.gov/visual-design/getting-started/
• Accessible design handbook from Canada https://www.rgd.ca/database/files/library/RGD_AccessAbility_Handbook.pdf
• The US Digital Services (federal level) has a good guide to online accessibility (not just graphic design, but more web design & web forms) https://designsystem.digital.gov/documentation/accessibility/

Court Form Design: the key components of a form

These general principles are great, but they can be hard to translate to the specific world of court forms. We need to dive into the specifics of the court form’s components — and people’s experiences of a form.

Court forms usually contain this shortlist of components. These are the ‘materials’ we can use in our design. We can also track — does the form have all these key things, does it get the hierarchy right, and does it treat them consistently?

• Credentials that signal the form is official for a jurisdiction
• Title and purpose, what the form is & what it’s about
• Instruction info for the user, so they know what to do overall, and then in each section
• Questions and tasks, asking the user for key information and posing choices to them
• Entry fields for the user to put information into
• Insider fields for the court staff to mark notes, enter info
• Links to more help and associated documents
• Next Steps & Deadlines of how to get this form into the court correctly, and what to expect after

Court Form Design: How litigants experience a form

People don’t magically see a form, get excited, and spend the next two hours completing it before they walk it over to the court clerk’s office. Their experience is usually much more complicated and stressful.

We need to see the court form not as a static document, but as an experience. Understanding people’s experience of a form helps us figure out specific principles that can help increase engagement, usability, and usefulness.

From our user testing and observation sessions at the Legal Design Lab, we’ve found trends in how litigants use forms — especially when they are self-represented.

• They scan them over quickly. What should I expect? How long is this going to take? Can I even do this? Am I up for this challenge?
• They do work in bursts. They may have 1 burst when they first engage. But they’ll likely pause & disengage after they get tired. Hopefully they’ll re-engage with later bursts!
• They might get distracted or discouraged when they can’t understand or feel overwhelmed. Can you help make sure this doesn’t lead to disengagement? Instead, support them there.
• They want to be ‘normal’ and strategic. The form should amplify their sense of legal capability — not make them feel lonely or dumb.

This is where we come back to the big goal of access to justice. Court forms could be an essential gateway to participating in the justice system. But they are hard! They ask complex, high-stakes information. And people are often in a high-stress situation, afraid of getting things wrong, and with a lot of other things to do in their life. So if a court form is badly designed, it can disengage users, and shut down their access to justice.

3. Running a Design Process on Your Court Forms

Great! Now we have user-centered metrics to aim for, we’re aiming at more engagement, usability, and usefulness, and we know some principles about how to do this. Let’s think even more concretely. How do we get courts, judicial councils, and forms committees to start improving the design of their court forms? How do we get more people-centered shifts, and more use of key design principles?

Kick off a Redesign by doing a User-Centered Design Review

If you’re inside the court, you can start a design process. I often like to do it in a series of workshops — beginning with design review sessions, involving many different stakeholders and especially court users.

You can lay out existing court forms on a board or a digital whiteboard, and then start going through what works or doesn’t. You can mark it up with post-its, pen, or even cut it up and reorganize.

We did this using a Miro board at today’s Form Camp session. We start a design review by beginning with a specific user’s POV. Today, we began with this user scenario:

A tenant in California has just been sued for eviction.

They’ve searched online & found a pdf of this form at the California courts’ webpage. https://www.courts.ca.gov/documents/ud105.pdf

How can we make it usable, useful, and engaging to this litigant?

So we situated our forms discussion in the user’s journey. They’ve come from a Google search, then to a court website, then to a digital pdf. Let’s imagine we are this tenant — and look at the pdf to see what we could improve.

I screenshot the 5 pages of the California unlawful detainer answer response. This is the document that a tenant would have to fill out, in order to defend themselves against an eviction lawsuit. I laid out the 5 pages on the digital whiteboard, and then asked my team to answer a series of questions about how well the form lived up to the key design principles. I took notes with post-its as they gave feedback.

I prepared a series of specific questions, to get the stakeholders to critique the current design based on the court form and visual design principles.

Better Court Form Design will be a continual process