UX and Legal Design Principles
The core principles of UX design are essential for good design and therefore also for a good legal designer. Let's take a closer look at these principles:
Usability
what: A product or service should be easy and understandable for everyone, regardless of their background or experience.
Example: Imagine you're drawing up a contract. Make sure the text is clear and concise, with a logical structure and a simple layout. This allows both legal professionals and laypeople to understand the contract quickly and easily and be confident that they are making the right decisions.
Consistency
What: Consistency in design means that similar elements and interactions are presented and executed in a similar way, so users can adapt quickly and work intuitively with the system without surprises or contradictions.
Example: Imagine a website where the buttons on one page have a rectangular shape and a circular shape on another page. This lack of consistency can lead to user confusion and doubt, worsening the user experience. By keeping the shape of the buttons consistent, users know what to expect and can better focus on the content and functionality of the website.
Consistency goes beyond product design. It can also be applied to legal processes within an office and even to a country's entire legal system. If you apply the principles consistently throughout, all services will work seamlessly and intuitively. It's important to ensure that people can run through the system on autopilot, which increases accessibility.
How: To ensure consistency, you can use design patterns and style guides to ensure that similar elements are presented and executed in a similar way. For example, using the same colors, fonts, and navigation styles in all parts of a website or app. Maintaining consistent terminology and tone of voice in legal documents and communication also helps create a coherent and predictable system.
By paying attention to consistency in your design, you not only increase usability and accessibility, but you also promote users' trust in the product or service and their willingness to keep working with it.
Hierarchy (or: order of information)
what: Hierarchy in design means organizing and presenting information based on its importance. This helps users prioritize information and tasks, allowing them to work more efficiently and make better-informed decisions.
Preview: Imagine an insurance policy document. Instead of presenting all information in a long, continuous text, a well-designed document would make key information, such as coverage and premium, clearly visible, while less important information, such as terms and conditions and exceptions, could be displayed in a less prominent place.
How: Hierarchy can be achieved by using various design elements, such as:
- Typography: Use different font sizes, fonts, and styles (e.g. bold, italic) to distinguish between important and less important information.
- Color: Use contrasting colors to draw attention to important information and muted colors for background information.
- Size: Make important elements larger and more visible, while making them less important
Accessibility
what: Accessibility means designing products, services, and environments that can be used by people with diverse skills, disabilities, or disabilities. The goal is to enable as many people as possible to fully participate in the use of a product or service.
Preview: An accessible legal website ensures that all users, including visually impaired people, can understand and interact with the content. This can be achieved by using sufficient color contrast, a clearly legible font, alternative text for images, and support for screen readers.
How: To ensure accessibility, you can focus on the following aspects:
- Readability: Choose fonts and colors that are easy to read, even for people with reduced vision. Use sufficient color contrast and avoid using color as the sole means of communication.
- Navigation: Make navigation intuitive and consistent so users with different skills and devices can easily find what they're looking for.
- Alternate content: Provide alternative text for images and multimedia so that people with visual or hearing disabilities can understand and benefit from the content.
- Scalability: Make sure content and layout are scalable so that users with different screen resolutions and zoom levels can easily view and read content.
- Keyboard accessibility: Make all interactions and navigation accessible via the keyboard so that people who can't use a mouse or a touchscreen can still fully participate.
Legal Design and UX Design
.png)
Legal design and UX design share many common principles, as they are both focused on creating user-friendly, accessible and intuitive products or services. By applying UX design to legal documents, systems and processes, we can make them more user-friendly and accessible to everyone, regardless of their knowledge, background, or capabilities. Legal jargon can be confusing and intimidating enough, so let's help the average user by creating designs that are clear, consistent, well-structured, and accessible to everyone.
