My Responsibilities

• Conducting user interviews with UX Researcher and Competitive analysis of similar tools
• Brainstorming solutions based on user needs and competitive analysis
• Wireframe Sketching and High fidelity mockups
• Design System
  
• Conducting review sessions with stakeholders
  
• Developer handoff

Setting the Stage

According to the World Justice Project’s Rule of Law Index 2021 report, Pakistan ranks 130th out of 139 countries. The country’s judicial system is dealing with a huge backlog of over 2 million cases. The average time it takes for a case to reach its conclusion in the lower courts of the country is around 5-10 years.

Looking at other countries, we found that digitisation was a solution to many of the problems with our judicial system. Some of the advantages would be, ease of access to most recent legal documents, tracking of judgements, and reduction in time and cost of research. This would be a huge step up from the largely manual and paper-based processes that were being followed to date.

The Challenge

Design a digital law repository that makes it easier for lawyers, judges, and students to search and curate judgements and statutes from verified sources

Our Users

• Lawyers
  Lawyers need access to most recent judgements and statutes to build their cases based on precedence and the laws of the country. Their process is bogged down by having to go through heavy law books to conduct their research.
• Judges
  Primarily, Judges need to be able to verify the documents being presented by lawyers when they make their case.
• Secondary User
  Law students, public, litigants, court officials, and academic researchers
• Administrator
  Users who manage the law repository by uploading documents and ensuring the data is correct and verified

Feature List

Profile Registration

Judgement Repository

Statutes Repository

Filtering

Search and Advanced Search

Reader & Annotation

Admin Functionalities

How we did it

User Interviews

We conducted user interviews firstly to gain an understanding of the existing processes our users followed to conduct legal research. Secondly, we wanted to validate our proposed features and gain a better understanding of how our users would interact with them. We also wanted to identify any opportunities to better cater to them. Below are a couple of highlights from the insights we gathered:

Any document older than 7 years is removed for the court’s online system.

Sometimes we just have a few hours to research the case.

For recent judgments, I have to go to the website of the relevant court.

I have to find all judgements in a law book so I can provide the appropriate citations.

I need to see judgements from different courts. For instance, a supreme court judgement trumps a high court judgement.

Any unreported judgement, cannot be seen in any of the books and Pakistan Law Society online search.

Headnotes often misrepresent the text and are irrelevant.

The current tools lack a proper filtering system.

I would like to see live status of judgements. For instance, if they have been appealed.

User Interviews

We conducted a competitor analysis to assess existing solutions for users including Pakistan Law Site and Physical Books, as well as popular academic repositories.

The Annual law digest is a book containing most recent and pertinent judgments. It is quite inefficient in the time it takes from the judgement being passed to lawyers being able to use them to build their cases. We made sure to browse through these books to understand the current legal structures and processes being followed.

We audited the closest digital solution to ours which was the Pakistan Law Site. Gathering feedback on this tool helped us focus on existing user pain points and opportunities for improvement before we started building our own solution.

We also looked at non-legal research tools such as Google Scholar, JStor, and ACM Library to evaluate features like filtering, search results, advanced search, etc. We took inspiration from individual features of each of these tools and adapted solutions according to our user needs.

Wireframe Sketches

I made wireframe sketches to put down a rough idea of our solutions. This helped the team align on the vision we had for our law repository before going deeper into the process.

Design System

With the wireframe sketches, I had an idea of the components that needed to be built out. I started a preliminary design system with key components and added to it as needed.

What we made

Following this process, we built an online law repository called the Digital Digest. This platform aimed to serve as a one stop for all legal documents in Pakistan. Our project was divided into phases where in the first phase we built a foundation for our repository with more data to be added later.

With this phase of the project, our users would be able to search for judgements based on multiple variables and our search engine would respond smartly accounting for human errors or variation in phrasing. They would receive search results relevant to their query and containing relevant metadata. They would be able to read, download and print these judgement documents and bookmark and organise them according to their needs. Our administrative users would be able to manually upload judgements, organise them and update metadata.

Iteration

To make any product go from good to great, it is essential to iterate. We conducted review and testing with multiple groups for different insights:

• User Review

  We did a screen by screen walkthrough with our users and they gave feedback on things to change or add. A few highlights were adding filters such as statutes and parties, fine tuning nomenclature, and adding additional status tags in search results
• Stakeholder Review

  Our stakeholders had access to the judges as well as knowledge of data constraints. We conducted frequent review sessions in order to validate if certain features were compatible with the available data. Also, we prioritised with them on the features taking into consideration what our primary users (Lawyers) needed.
• Design Review

  We conducted a design review with our internal team to ensure that our prototype was up to a certain standard. We received feedback on refining menus and button placement and how to make the experience more appealing and elegant.

Did it work?

The project was stopped due to political challenges in the country and the judiciary had critical matters to attend to. Fingers are still crossed that this project might restart when the situation improves.

Key Learnings

• Validate your assumptions before building

  This project started with a feature list. We could have just dived in and built wireframes from the get go. However, we were adamant that we wanted to conduct interviews with real users to understand how they currently did things and why. This helped us hone in on the purpose of our product and put the most pertinent user needs at the forefront.
• Don’t reinvent the wheel

  ‍Starting out on this project, we knew there were a lot of similar tools in the market. We took a detailed look at a lot of these tools and it helped us tighten up our process and focus on solving user problems rather than the details of each feature.
• Conduct design reviews for a different perspective

  User testing is essential to any design process. However, conducting review sessions with other designers can provide a lot of good feedback based on design principles, and heuristic evaluation. This feedback can help produce designs which go beyond user expectations.
• Design is negotiation

  This project had a varying group of users and was in a landscape where digitization is still a new concept. Therefore, we had to balance what we found were the most important user needs with the judges’ vision of the justice system and the realities of data constraints. We had to let go of the availability of statutes in the first phase as well as a legal dictionary although our users deemed them important. We also removed book citations since judges claimed that this tool would replace books altogether. However, we made sure to communicate user needs to the stakeholders so any trade offs were made consciously and were addressed in later iterations.