Legal Design as a Thing:

A Theory of Change and

a Set of Methods to Craft a
Human-Centered Legal System
Margaret Hagan

Introduction
1 Charles Owen, “Design Thinking: Notes
on Its Nature and Use,” Design Research Human-centered design has been a dominant innovation method-
Quarterly 1, no. 2 (2006): 16–27; Tim ology in service industries, from medicine to insurance to finance.1
Brown, “Design Thinking,” Harvard It has now come to the legal system, together with movements
Business Review (June 2008): 85–92;
related to legal technology, legal hacking, and access to justice
Charles Owen, “Design Thinking: Driving
reform, as a collective legal design movement.2
Innovation,” BPM Strategies Magazine,
The Business Process Management University labs, conferences, classes, and new job positions
Institute, September 2006; and Richard are oriented around “legal design”—the marriage of a human-cen-
Buchanan, “Wicked Problems in Design tered design approach to the challenges and structures of the legal
Thinking,” Design Issues 8, no. 2 (Spring
system. 3 This burgeoning community of people is interested in
1992): 5–21. doi.org/10.2307/1511637.
using a design approach to improve the legal system.4 In light of
2 Colette Brunschwig, “On Visual Law:
Visual Legal Communication Practices this growth, the need arises for more rigor: rigor in how a design
and Their Scholarly Exploration,” in process is applied, in how design research is conducted, and in
Zeichen Und Zauber Des Rechts: how the outcomes of this process and research are evaluated. Fur-
Festschrift Für Friedrich Lachmayer ther discussion is needed to ground this design work, which is
[Signs and Magic of the Rights:
often creative, decentralized, and open, in an essential set of meth-
Commemorative for Friedrich Lachmayer]
eds. Erich Schweihofer et al. (Bern: ods and instruments. These parameters can ensure honest reflec-
Editions Weblaw, 2014), 899–933; tion on how well the design approach can serve the legal system,
Véronique Fraser and Jean-François improve people’s access to justice, and promote innovation in this
Roberge, “Legal Design Lawyering: professional community.
Rebooting Legal Business Model with
This special issue presents pieces from lawyers, designers,
Design Thinking,” Pepperdine Dispute
Resolution Law Journal 16, no. 2008 technologists, scholars, and community organizers that detail what
(2016): 303–16; Jamie Young, A Virtual legal design is in practice. The pieces demonstrate how the craft of
Day in Court: Design Thinking and Virtual legal design is developing as one that combines a community-
Courts (London: RSA, 2011); Victor oriented co-design ethos, with a commitment to navigating the
Quintanilla, “Human-Centered Civil
bureaucracies of the legal system to effect change, and with the
Justice Design,” Penn State Law Review
121, no. 3 (2017): 745–806; and Mark integration of empirical research to evaluate whether user-centered
Szabo, “Design Thinking in Legal Practice design and policy proposals do, in fact, improve people’s outcomes.
Management,” Design Management Before readers dive into this collection of cases, this intro-
Review 21, no. 3 (September 29, 2010): ductory piece gives some initial grounding. It offers an initial legal
44–6.
design process, set of research methodologies and instruments,
3 Margaret Hagan, “The State of Legal
Design: The Big Takeaways of the and grounding in analogous fields and literature. It also offers
Stanford Law + Design Summit,” Legal a wider theory of change—of how a design approach can feed into
Design and Innovation, September 25,
2017, https://medium.com/legal-design-
and-innovation/the-state-of-legal-design-
the-big-takeaways-of-the-stanford-law-
© 2020 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
https://doi.org/10.1162/desi_a_00600 DesignIssues: Volume 36, Number 3 Summer 2020 3
 improved legal services, policy-making, and civic interactions
between people and government. This initial vision of a rigorous
design and research methodology for the legal system is a first
version; researchers and practitioners can refine it as they learn the
best methods to use in specific legal contexts. As an initial archi-
tecture, it aims to open a conversation around rigorous human-
centered experiments to improve the legal system. It also seeks to
engender a willingness among those working on design, technol-
ogy, and innovation in law to hold themselves accountable with a
commitment to strong research and evaluation standards.

A Design Approach to Legal System Innovation

Legal design is a nascent movement to make the legal system
work better for people. 5 It has been developed out of work in
human-centered and visual design, civic technology, and partici-
patory policy-making. It brings a lawyerly focus on abstract com-
plexities (e.g., what rights we have, what risks we face, what rules
constrain us) with a designerly focus on lived experience (how we
do things, how things look and feel to us, how things serve us).
Both the lawyerly focus and designerly focus share a core similar-
ity: to strategically improve people’s outcomes in a system, to solve
complex problems, to be in service.
Legal design seeks the improvement of the legal system
on multiple fronts: It wants to make the system more accessible to
lay people who must use it to resolve problems with money, hous-
ing, and family; it has in view corporate professionals who use the
system to contract, litigate, and conduct business; and it serves pol-
icy-makers and government officials who use the system to set
standards, hold powerful interests accountable, and enforce com-
pliance based on rights and obligations.
The purpose of legal design is to develop a human-centered,
participatory approach to reforming the legal system—one that
recognizes the importance of new technology but that does not
privilege it as the main way to innovate. The approach weaves
together design of documents, products, services, spaces, policies,
and laws to make systemic changes that still pay close attention
to front-line realities. It recognizes the value of having interdisci-
design-summit-ee363b5bf109; and Nora plinary, inclusive groups build and test new improvements to the
Al Haider, “The Legal Design Summit system. Legal design draws on the creative exploration and making
Recap: Uncharted Territory,” Legal Design of design work, along with the systems thinking and analysis of
and Innovation, January 1, 2018, https:// legal work.
medium.com/legal-design-and-innova-
The wider theory of change for a design-driven approach
tion/the-legal-design-summit-recap-
uncharted-territory-77d8795315cc. to law is that cascading layers of efforts are needed for transforma-
4 See the Legal Design Alliance at https:// tive impact. The entry points could be diverse and multi-channel.
www.legaldesignalliance.org/ (accessed For example, one flow could look as follows:
February 20, 2020).
5 Legal Design Alliance (website), “The
Legal Design Manifesto,” 2018, https://
www.legaldesignalliance.org/.

4 DesignIssues: Volume 36, Number 3 Summer 2020

 1. Broader, participatory network. A diverse group of
professionals (beyond lawyers) and the public are
involved in discussions and design of how to reform
the legal system, through design events.
2. Human-centered research of needs and opportunities. This
interdisciplinary, participatory network can conduct
research into what people’s needs and opportunities are
regarding the legal system. This research might consider
justiciable events, experiential and process problems,
and usability breakdowns. It also involves legal mapping,
to understand the rules, policies, and legislation that
define the current system and that might be levers for
future interventions.
3. Exploratory designs. The research defines an agenda
regarding new products, services, and policies that can
make the legal system work better for people. Groups in
university labs, public institutions, foundations, small
companies, and large existing legal and professional
services companies develop and test-run these new
improvements, using the research to guide them. This
step involves exploratory design and research. Often in
legal design, these test runs mix the introduction of new
frontline programs (e.g., communications, products,
technology, services, and spaces) with reform of backend
structures (e.g., rules, laws, regulatory structures, norms,
and policies).
4. Field pilots and evaluation. The new interventions and
policies that test well in the exploratory stage are then
refined sufficiently to be piloted in the field. People’s
experiences and outcomes are evaluated to determine
whether they increase both the level and quality of
justice and the efficiency and usability of the system.
Outcomes might include people’s ability to resolve
issues promptly, fully, and collaboratively. They also
might relate to people’s ability to comprehend and act
in the legal system.
5. Scale and replication. The piloted interventions and
policies that are shown through observational and
controlled trials to have positive outcome are then
scaled and replicated and established as the new
standard for how the legal system should operate.
6. Long-term evaluation. In a longer timeframe, the
implementations can be evaluated for larger,
downstream implications. Studies can determine
whether they improve rule of law, alleviate poverty,
improve quality of life, improve the economy, and
improve people’s relationships with the justice system
and with government more widely.

DesignIssues: Volume 36, Number 3 Summer 2020 5

 This vision of legal design serves to launch new policy reforms,
technology interventions, and service and visual design initiatives
that can improve the legal system. Users of legal design approach
should have a commitment to a participatory public involvement;
dedicated focus on people’s experiences and outcomes; experi-
mentation with technology, services, visuals, and policy design;
and gradual refinement of new solutions that pair creative innova-
tion theory with evidence-based policymaking. In addition to
laying out potential effects and outcomes of legal design, this the-
ory of change provides the base architecture for methods that can
be used to produce them. Each phase of legal design work entails
different sets of methodologies to do rigorous, rich work. The next
sections go through each phase to discuss specific methods.

Methods for Legal Design Work

The heart of legal design is the human-centered design process,
which involves a basic sequence of design work.6 It begins with a
phase of seeking to understand a challenge area (or possible areas
for reform) through interviews, ethnography, observations, data
gathering, and exploratory workshops. The process then moves
toward synthesizing specific user personas, needs statements,
requirements lists, and design briefs. Brainstorming, speculative
designs, collaborative co-design, and early rough prototyping
follow to begin trying out new ways to resolve the defined chal-
lenge. This expansive creativity then gradually moves toward
specific prototypes, which are tested for usability, experience,
and feasibility. Prototypes are gradually refined toward pilots
through testing and co-design, which leads toward pilots and
scaled implementations.
Although the human-centered design process has grown
in prominence as an innovation method, it is not often grounded
in academic or rigorous methodology. Legal design, at this early
stage of its development, can be more intentional about how and
why it is practiced. Like many other fields that also use a design-
driven approach to generate new interventions and knowledge—
like social innovation, human–computer interaction, research
through design, design for dignity, and participatory design—
legal design can create a hybrid of methodologies that leads to
practical and academic results. If the goal of legal design is to cre-
ate not just new innovations, but innovations that can be piloted
and can form the basis for evidence-based reforms and policy-
6 See more detailed descriptions of this
making in the justice system, then a heightened level of attention to
process in Brown, “Design Thinking”;
Lucy Kimbell and Joe Julier, The Social
methodology is necessary.
Design Methods Menu (London: Fieldstu-
dio, October 2012), 1–56; and Lisa Carl-
gren et al., “Framing Design Thinking:
The Concept in Idea and Enactment,”
Creativity and Innovation Management
25, no. 1 (2016): 38–57.

6 DesignIssues: Volume 36, Number 3 Summer 2020

 Participatory and Cross-Disciplinary Innovation Communities
At the initial stage of legal design work—of bringing a wider com-
munity into the agenda-setting, creation, and evaluation of new
innovations in the justice system—the methodology centers on cre-
ating a more participatory and interdisciplinary group of stake-
holders who are involved in the design process.
Methods from participatory design offer particularly helpful
guidance in this phase.7 This version of a design process integrates
more stakeholders into decision-making roles during exploratory
research and design. This integration occurs through collaborative
workshops, design camps, community awards, co-design sessions,
making and prioritization games, and other methods that allow
for a wider variety of people to participate in design.8 The methods
are often dynamic and interactive. Participatory methods are qual-
itative, generative tools for research into people’s needs, creating
new concepts and setting the agenda.9
Participatory action research in law and elsewhere also puts
7 Ezio Manzini and Francesca Rizzo, “Small community members at the center of new reform efforts.10 The
Projects/Large Changes: Participatory methods include holding concept mapping workshops to let vari-
Design as an Open Participated Process,” ous groups and people think through power relationships, current
CoDesign 7, no. 3–4 (2011): 199–215.
process, and visions of how the system could be better. Other
8 Elizabeth Sanders, “From User-Centered
methods include asset mapping (to identify common strengths and
to Participatory Design Approaches,” in
Design and the Social Sciences, ed. J. talents outside the formal institutions), appreciative inquiry to
Frascara (London: Taylor & Francis, 2002), build a resource map of how leaders can better draw on the com-
1–8. munity, and seeing issues from a different perspective when prior-
9 Veronica Donoso et al., Increasing User
itizing community resources. Fishbone diagrams, that lay out
Empowerment Through Participatory and
sequences of actions and people into a backbone and offshoots,
Co-Design Methodologies (Brussels:
EMSOC, 2014); and Clay Spinuzzi, “The reveal root causes to symptoms and surface dynamics—can be
Methodology of Participatory Design,” used in a group setting to understand true problems and needs, as
Technical Communication 52, no. 2 well as to build better community relationships around common
(2005): 163–74. points of view.
10 Emily Houh and Kristin Kalsen, “It’s Criti-
Photovoice is a more distributed method (outside of a work-
cal: Legal Participatory Action Research,”
Michigan Journal of Race & Law 19, no. shop), in which community members take photos and collect
2 (2014): 287–347. images to bring to the group to represent the challenge being dis-
11 Anirudh Dinesh, “Participatory Budgeting cussed. These images initiate an analytic conversation about com-
and Civic Innovation in the Digital Age,” munity experiences and needs.
GovLab Blog, March 15, 2016, http://
Other work from open government, such as participatory
thegovlab.org/participatory-budgeting-
and-civic-innovation-in-the-digital- budgeting and other methods, involve the citizenry in government
age-2/; and Sónia Gonçalves, “The reform and can serve as analogous inspiration for legal designers.11
Effects of Participatory Budgeting on Ongoing consultations and creative interactions between elected
Municipal Expenditures and Infant Mor- officials, members of the public, and career government workers
tality in Brazil,” World Development 53
can cross over from formal, rigid public consultations to more col-
(2014): 94–110.
12 Julie Simon et al., NESTA Digital Democ- laborative, open-ended, and creative design work.12 This outcome
racy: The Tools Transforming Political also motivates open contracting—a process that could be adapted to
Engagement (London: NESTA, 2017). other government functions.13
13 Open Contracting Partnership, Open Con-
tracting: A Guide for Practitioners By
Practitioners (Washington, DC: Open
Contracting Partnership, 2013).

DesignIssues: Volume 36, Number 3 Summer 2020 7

 The burgeoning movement in open government and participatory
social services, along with policy labs and living labs, provides a rich
14 Christian Bason, “Discovering Co-Produc- array of tested methods that legal designers can borrow when
tion by Design,” Public and Collaborative: expanding the stakeholders included in justice reform.14 These
Exploring the Intersection of Design, labs have developed models to combine more interdisciplinary
Social Innovation, and Public Policy, eds. professional teams and to tackle challenges using hybrid method-
Ezio Manzini and Eduardo Staszowski
ologies that cross traditional barriers. The policy labs’ ways of
(New York: DESIS, 2013): vii–1.
15 Christian Bason et al., “How Public structuring innovation teams, of consulting with the public, and of
Design?,” in Copenhagen Design Week shepherding creative work from exploration to pilot all can serve
2011 Proceedings (Copenhagen: Mind- as blueprints for legal design work.15
Lab, 2011); Lucy Kimbell, Applying
Design Approaches to Policy Making:
Human-Centered Research into Legal Needs and Opportunities
Discovering Policy Lab (Brighton:
University of Brighton, 2015); and Mónica In the second phase of legal design work, which involves under-
Edwards-Schachter et al., “Fostering standing what a human-centered agenda of legal reform should be,
Quality of Life Through Social Innovation: the methodologies focus more on uncovering needs and prioritiz-
A Living Lab Methodology Study Case,” ing opportunities.
Review of Policy Research 29, no. 6
The literature focusing on legal needs surveys describes a
(November 2012): 672–92.
16 Pascoe Pleasance et al., “Paths to more quantitative approach to integrate into this understanding of
Justice: A Past, Present and Future needs.16 These surveys begin to categorize areas of justiciable
Roadmap” (London: Centre for Empirical events that people have and to offer some understanding of pat-
Legal Studies, 2013); Rebecca L. terns, clusters, and people’s behavior in response to these legal
Sandefur, “Accessing Justice in the
problems. They reveal large-scale trends that can guide more
Contemporary USA: Findings from the
Community Needs and Services Study,” micro-level design research.
American Bar Association (2014); and Research methods focusing on large-scale trends and partic-
Peter Chapman and Alejandro Ponce, ular user-generated content on various Internet services—methods
“How Do We Measure Access to that are used by those working on social innovation, political activ-
Justice? A Global Survey of Legal
ism, and public health—can also help legal designers to better
Needs Shows the Way,” Open Society
Foundations (March 2018). understand needs and opportunities. Methods to audit search
17 Ronald E. Robertson et al., “Auditing results can be used to understand how people are interacting with
the Personalization and Composition of legal services online.17 Bots, crowdsourcing, and online classifica-
Politically-Related Search Engine Results tion tools powered by artificial intelligence (AI) also can be used
Pages,” in WWW ’18: Proceedings of the
by researchers to spot, count, and characterize people who are
2018 World Wide Web Conference (New
York: ACM, 2018), 955–65.
expressing needs while on social media (e.g., on Twitter, Google,
18 Eiji Aramaki et al., “Twitter Catches the and other platforms).18
Flu : Detecting Influenza Epidemics Using Design research methods bring a more grounded, quali-
Twitter,” Proceedings of the 2011 Con- tative understanding of needs and experience. Applied ethnography
ference on Empirical Methods in Natural
is a primary technique used for legal design research into user
Language Processing (Edinburgh: Associ-
ation for Computational Linguistics, 2011):
needs. It entails either observations of people in legal institutions,
1568–76; Patipat Susumpow et al., doing legal tasks, or researchers’ going through the processes
“Participatory Disease Detection Through themselves (either shadowing litigants or professionals, or under-
Digital Volunteerism: How the Doctorme taking the legal tasks themselves).19 This technique also can involve
Application Aims to Capture Data for
stakeholders who do collaborative design, mapping their journey,
Faster Disease Detection in Thailand,”
in WWW ’14 Companion: Proceedings
in situ acting and improvisation of scenarios, self-recording
of the 23rd International Conference diaries, sharing of their artifacts, and interacting with props and
on World Wide Web (New York: ACM, playful mock-ups.20 The goal is to find people in the context of the
2014), 663–66; and Jeremy Ginsberg et
al., “Detecting Influenza Epidemics Using
Search Engine Query Data,” Nature 457,
no. 7232 (2009): 1012–14.

8 DesignIssues: Volume 36, Number 3 Summer 2020

 system who are trying to use the system through its technologies,
19 Margaret D. Hagan, “A Human-Centered
rules, interfaces, language, and services and then to gather infor-
Design Approach to Access Justice:
Generating New Prototypes and mation from them by triggering a reflective process that can
Hypotheses for Intervention to Make expose what their deeper needs and aspirations are. The ethno-
Courts User-Friendly,” Indiana Journal graphic techniques bring thick, rich descriptions of how people
of Law and Social Equality 6, no. 2 currently are trying to use the legal system (or to serve others in
(2018): 199–239; and Indi Young,
the system) and of the possible hooks or policy changes that are
Mental Models Aligning Design Strategy
with Human Behavior (San Francisco,
called for.21 They can produce coded interview notes, journey maps
CA: Rosenfeld Media, 2008). of individual users, swimlane diagrams that map out multiple
20 Salu Ylirisku and Jacob Buur, Designing stakeholders’ experiences, lists of user requirements, annotated
with Video (New York: Springer, 2009); system maps prioritizing stakeholders and problems, and other
and Jacob Buur and Larisa Sitorus,
artifacts to capture the status quo.22
“Ethnography as Design Provocation,”
in Ethnographic Praxis in Industry
Grounded theory offers a related method for collecting a vari-
Conference Proceedings (Portland: ety of interviews, observations, and other data points, and using
American Anthropological Association, them to synthesize common patterns and themes.23 The grounded
2007), 146–57. theory qualitative approach to social science considers phenomena
21 Corina Sas et al., “Generating Implica-
as perpetually changing—and it works to uncover what these con-
tions for Design Through Design
Research,” Proceedings of the 32nd
ditions are, how people respond to them, and the consequences of
Annual ACM Conference on Human this action. Its methodologies involve wide data collection—from
Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’14) interviews, observations, and secondary accounts—and then grad-
(New York: ACM, 2014), 1971–80. ual development of codes, categories, relationships, and themes in
22 Margaret Hagan, Law By Design
this data. Insights and hypotheses are derived from a sample of on-
(Stanford: Legal Design Lab, 2016) at
http://www.lawbydesign.co/en/home/
the-ground conditions and experiences, so that the researcher (or
(accessed February 20, 2020). legal designer) is grounded in these human realities when propos-
23 Juliet Corbin and Anselm Strauss, ing what the status quo of the legal system is, the main categories
“Grounded Theory Research,” Qualitative of people involved, and potential next steps.24
Sociology 13, no. 1 (1990): 3–21.
A more structured, quantitative form of user need scouting
24 Shamal Faily and Ivan Flechais, “Persona
Cases: A Technique for Grounding
can be borrowed from futurist and forecast studies, which use the
Personas,” CHI ’11 Proceedings of the Delphi method to source an agenda from multiple leaders. The Del-
SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in phi technique involves having multiple experts react to a prompt,
Computing Systems (New York: ACM, to forecast what they predict will happen in the future and to offer
2011), 2267–70.
a vision for what should happen.25 It has been used in health care
25 Felicity Hasson and Sinead Keeney,
“Enhancing Rigour in the Delphi
for participatory agenda-setting and to structure group communi-
Technique Research,” Technological cation around how to solve a complex problem.26 This forecasting
Forecasting and Social Change 78, no. 9 method can be adapted to a wider group of stakeholders (not only
(2011): 1695–1704; and Jari Kaivo-oja legal experts) to solicit visions from more people about where they
et al., “The Crowdsourcing Delphi:
would spend resources to improve the legal system—for example,
Combining the Delphi Methodology and
Crowdsourcing Techniques,” in The XXIV
by ranking needs and opportunities and by participating in fic-
ISPIM Conference – Innovating in Global tional games that would allocate funds to the stakeholders.27
Markets: Challenges for Sustainable
Growth (Helsinki: ISPIM, 2013), 1–18. Methods for Creating Exploratory Designs
26 Amber Fletcher and Gregory Marchildon,
In moving from the understanding of needs to the creation of new
“Using the Delphi Method for Qualitative,
ideas and prototypes for improvement, the methodologies involve
Participatory Action Research in Health
Leadership,” International Journal of more creative, speculative, and building-focused work.
Qualitative Methods 13, no. 1 (2014):
1–18.
27 Guillermo Aldunate et al., “Doing User
Research in the Courts on the Future of
Access to Justice,” Legal Design and

DesignIssues: Volume 36, Number 3 Summer 2020 9

 The Research Through Design community in human-com-
Innovation, July 5, 2018, https://medium.
puter interaction (HCI) has established a set of grounded method-
com/legal-design-and-innovation/
doing-user-research-in-the-courts-on-the- ologies to create early-stage prototypes as a means to inquire into
future-of-access-to-justice-cb7a75dc3a4b user needs and contexts.28 Design researchers approach complex,
(accessed on February 20, 2020). wicked problem areas—with many different stakeholders and
28 John Zimmerman et al., “An Analysis
competing priorities—using methods that involve building new
and Critique of Research Through Design:
artifacts, testing them, and collaborative iteration to revise them,
Towards a Formalization of a Research
Approach,” Conference on Designing and through this process developing stronger theories, hypotheses,
Interactive Systems (Aarhus: ACM, 2010), and visions of change.29 These efforts often are long-term research
310–19. projects, involving repeated investigations and multiple rounds of
29 John Zimmerman et al., “Research
creation, theory-creation, and re-creation of new interventions. The
Through Design as a Method for Inter-
design team creates testable hypotheses about how to address the
action Design Research in HCI,” CHI ’07:
Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference defined challenge by creating early prototypes, testing them, and
on Human Factors in Computing Systems then revising their hypothesis and their prototype accordingly.30
(New York: ACM, 2007), 493–502. Creating these new exploratory designs involves a wide
30 David V. Keyson and Miguel Bruns
variety of practical design methods for brainstorming, prototyp-
Alonso, “Empirical Research Through
ing, and running early-stage testing or collaborative design
Design,” Proceedings of the 3rd Confer-
ence of the International Association of reviews. Human-centered design toolkits offer concrete methods for
Societies of Design Research (IASDR’09): running brainstorming sessions, including creative matrices, anal-
Rigor and Relevance in Design (Seoul, ogous research, improvisation and bodystorming, interdisciplinary
Korea: IASDR, 2009), 4548–57.
brainstorms, and crowdsourced open innovation competitions.31
31 Luma Institute, Innovating for People:
Service design methods are of particular use in legal design, to
Handbook of Human-Centered Design
Methods (Pittsburgh, PA: Luma, 2012); research people’s needs and system dynamics and to transform the
CoLab, Follow the Rabbit: A Field Guide research into new ways to provide services through technology,
to Systemic Design (Toronto: Ryerson, organizational changes, policies, visuals, and other coordinated
2016); and Ursula Davies and Kelly interventions.32 These research activities involve brainstorming to
Wilson, Design Methods for Developing
create early prototypes, like storyboards, proposed blueprints,
Services (London: Colaborativismo, 2013).
32 Marc Stickdorn et al., This Is Service sketches of new ideas and products, acting out new experiences
Design Doing (San Francisco: O’Reilly, and interactions, and hacking current spaces with quick new
2017). visions of what could be different.33
33 Kimbell and Julier, “Social Design,” In legal design, the typical product or service design proto-
45–50.
types also expand to include Policy Prototyping, as has been estab-
34 Lucy Kimbell and Jocelyn Bailey,
“Prototyping and the New Spirit of lished in other public service innovation methodologies. 34 This
Policy-Making,” CoDesign 13, no. 3 (July approach involves taking the sketching, building, and improvisa-
3, 2017): 214–26; Verena Kontschieder, tion of more traditional early-stage prototyping to a more complex,
“Prototyping in Policy—What For?!,” system-level experiment on how things can be changed. A policy
Legal Design and Innovation, October 16,
prototype in public service innovation involves creating visual,
2018, https://medium.com/legal-design-
and-innovation/prototyping-in-policy- service, and product prototypes—in addition to prototypes of new
what-for-c7c567d922ec (accessed policies—to run a series of small experiments to test what behav-
February 20, 2020); and Lorenzo Allio, iors, risks, and other unexpected outcomes emerge from these
Design Thinking for Public Service changes.35 This nascent expansion of design methods into policy-
Excellence (Singapore: UNDP, 2014).
making can be used by legal designers to conduct more explor-
35 Margaret Hagan, “Quick Takes on How to
Bring Prototyping into Policy-Making,” atory, pre-pilot work in how court rules, legislation, regulation, and
Legal Design and Innovation, November other policies can be reformed.
15, 2018, https://medium.com/legal-
design-and-innovation/quick-takes-on-
how-to-bring-prototyping-into-policy-
making-cc720f306d93 (accessed
February 20, 2020).

10 DesignIssues: Volume 36, Number 3 Summer 2020

 Co-design supplements these generative methods by prioritizing
the inclusion of a wide group of stakeholders in the brainstorming
and prototyping.36 It offers methods to expand these creative activ-
ities to more amateur community members or system leaders (who
36 Jakob Trischler et al., “The Value of typically do not think of themselves as creative).37 Co-design often
Codesign: The Effect of Customer
happens in workshops in which experienced designers and devel-
Involvement in Service Design Teams,”
opers are paired with amateur ones, but with everyone sketching,
Journal of Service Research 21, no. 1
(2018): 75–100; and Sofia Hussain et al., discussing, and building together. The more skilled designers and
“Participatory Design with Marginalized developers then begin to translate the group’s vision into a refined
People in Developing Countries: exploratory design.38
Challenges and Opportunities Experi-
The strand of methodologies around speculative design offers
enced in a Field Study in Cambodia,”
ways to explore possible interventions that may not yet be feasible,
International Journal of Design 6,
no. 2 (2012): 91–109. but that can help stretch the community’s vision, challenge their
37 Donoso et al., Increasing User biases, and think in longer timelines. Rather than aiming at imme-
Empowerment. diate practicality (solving the problem right now), this branch of
38 André Liem and Elizabeth B.N. Sanders,
design methods encourages the generation of knowledge through
“The Impact of Human-Centred Design
the design of new interventions that are provocative, that can elicit
Workshops in Strategic Design Projects,”
in Lecture Notes in Computer Science reactions to help the design team better understand what the limits
(Including Subseries Lecture Notes in of a design space are.39 Speculative design, sometimes called provo-
Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes typing (rather than prototyping, for its provocative nature), is then
in Bioinformatics) 6776 (Berlin: LNCS, used to have a critical conversation or co-design workshop.40 Stake-
2011): 110–19.
holders thus engage with a challenging vision of what could be,
39 Elizabeth B.N. Sanders, “Perspectives
on Participation in Design,” in Wer and the design team can push the vision of interventions to be more
Gestaltet Die Gestaltung? Praxis, Theorie ambitious, to think beyond immediate realities, and to also see
Und Geschichte Des Partizipatorischen what the boundaries of acceptable new interventions would be.41
Designs [Who Designs the Design? Design pattern libraries also are a useful tool and methodol-
Practice, Theory, and History of Participa-
ogy during the creation phase of legal design work. Numerous
tory Design] (Berlin: Transcript, 2008),
61–74. design patterns already have been proposed around specific legal
40 Laurens Boer and Jared Donovan, objectives—particularly regarding communication of complex
“Provotypes for Participatory Innovation,” information via contracts, policy statements, and terms of service.42
in DIS ’12: Proceedings of the Designing The pattern library is a means to facilitate the creation of new in-
Interactive Systems Conference (New
terventions based on previous vetted practices and to jumpstart
York: ACM Press, 2012), 388.
41 Buur and Sitorious, “Ethnography as effective design work. The patterns are most common in visual
Design Provocation.” communication and interaction designs, although legal design also
42 Florian Schaub et al., “A Design might work to expand the design pattern method into other sys-
Space for Effective Privacy Notices,” in temic areas, to capture best practices and standard forms of service
Eleventh Symposium on Usable Privacy
and policy innovation.
and Security (SOUPS 2015) (Berkeley:
USENIX Association, 2015), 1–17; Helena
Haapio and Margaret Hagan, “Design Early Evaluation of New Designs
Patterns for Contracts,” Internationales As many concepts and prototypes emerge from the creative phase,
Rechtsinformatik Symposion IRIS the next set of methodologies get early, meaningful evaluation of
[International Legal Informatics
which designs should advance to pilot. Feedback clarifies how to
Symposium] (Vienna: Weblaw, 2016):
381–88; and Helena Haapio et al., make them more engaging and usable, what risks and ethical
“Legal Design Patterns for Privacy,” in concerns might emerge out of them, and how they can be refined
Data Protection/LegalTech: Proceedings
of the 21st International Legal
Informatics Symposium IRIS, ed. Erich
Schweighofer (Vienna: Weblaw,
2018), 445–50.

DesignIssues: Volume 36, Number 3 Summer 2020 11

 before being “hardened” into pilots. The methods of evaluation at
this stage vary depending on the type of legal “thing” being
43 Zhao Huang and Laurence Brooks,
“Usability Evaluation and Redesign designed. Is the intervention a new communication, product, ser-
of E-Government: Users’ Centred vice, organization, or policy, for example? Specific instruments can
Approach,” in Recent Advances in be used to evaluate these different types of prototypes, although
Computer Science and Information common themes cross all areas of early-stage legal design work.
Engineering: Lecture Notes in Electrical
For all legal design work, the usability of a new innovation is
Engineering, eds. Z. Qian et al. (Berlin:
Springer, 2012): 615–25; Lili Wang et al., a central criterion. Other public service innovation design method-
“Evaluating Web-Based e-Government ologies have been developed to evaluate new communications,
Services with a Citizen-Centric technology, and services based on system usability.43 Standard
Approach,” in 38th Hawaii International surveys are available to measure system usability; they include
Conference on System Sciences (Big
fewer than 10 survey questions to reliably elicit feedback from pos-
Island, HI: IEEE, 2005): 1–10; and Cora
Sio Kuan Lai and Guilherme Pires, “Test- sible users of a new prototype about whether the thing makes the
ing of a Model Evaluating E-Government system more or less usable for them.44 These usability surveys also
Portal Acceptance and Satisfaction,” can begin to measure whether stakeholders’ experience and confi-
The Electronic Journal of Information dence with the new prototype will be positive. Usability studies
Systems Evaluation 13, no. 1 (2010):
look at ease of learning a new intervention, efficiency of using it,
35–46.
44 Aaron Bangor et al., “An Empirical and the speed and accuracy in performing tasks with it.45 Beyond
Evaluation of the System Usability usability, other government technology researchers also have
Scale,” International Journal of Human– developed research methods to gauge technology acceptance, moti-
Computer Interaction 24, no. 6 (July vational models to gauge people’s motivation for using new inter-
2008): 574–94.
ventions, and other measures to determine how to roll out new
45 Hyewon Suh et al., “Developing and
Validating the User Burden Scale,” in interventions that will affect whether and how people use them.46
CHI ’16: Proceedings of the 2016 Procedural justice is another area for legal design evaluation.
CHI Conference on Human Factors in Even if a prototype makes the legal system more usable, does it
Computing Systems (New York: ACM, also improve people’s sense of being treated with respect and dig-
2016), 3988–99.
nity within the system? Does it improve their sense of confidence
46 Ben-Tzion Karsh, “Beyond Usability:
Designing Effective Technology Imple- in their ability to interact with the government, and their sense of
mentation Systems to Promote Patient faith in the government’s effectiveness and rule of law? Procedural
Safety,” in Quality and Safety in Health justice instruments, developed primarily in relation to police–
Care (Madison, WI: BMJ Publishing citizen relationships, can be useful to legal designers.47 They are
Group, October 2004), 388–94.
short surveys that ask respondents about their relationship with a
47 Jason Sunshine and Tom R. Tyler,
“The Role of Procedural Justice and government institution and can be adapted to evaluate a proposed
Legitimacy in Shaping Public Support for new intervention: Would this new thing improve or exacerbate the
Policing,” Law & Society Review 37, no. procedural justice factors? 48
3 (September 1, 2003): 513–48; Tom Related to the justice measures are methods to measure
R. Tyler, “Procedural Justice and the
Design for Dignity. These instruments, mainly taken from the study
Courts,” Court Review: The Journal
of the American Judges Association 44,
of health care (particularly end-of-life palliative care), measure
no. 1/2 (2007): 26–31; Roger K. Warren, indicators of people’s experiences, confidence, and perceived
“Public Trust and Procedural Justice,” control in a system.49 Dignity often is measured using the concept
Court Review (Fall 2000): 12–16; Steve of “perceived control,” in which users’ experience measures are not
Leben, “Procedural-Fairness Movement
only about happiness and satisfaction, but also about their sense
Comes of Age,” Trends in State Courts
(Williamsburgh, National Center for State
of being treated with care, their knowledge of the complicated
Courts, 2014), 59–62; and Margaret system, and their confidence that they have quality choices and
Hagan and Miso Kim, “Design for Dignity
and Procedural Justice,” in AFHE 2017:
Advances in Affective and Pleasurable
Design, eds. W. Chung et al. (Berlin:
Springer, 2018):135–45.

12 DesignIssues: Volume 36, Number 3 Summer 2020

 an ability to act. 50 Researchers studying technology use among
48 Tom R. Tyler, “What Is Procedural
vulnerable populations, like the homeless and refugees, have also
Justice?: Criteria Used By Citizens
to Assess the Fairness of Legal developed methods to evaluate dignity-related outcomes when
Procedures,” Law & Society Review 22, testing new interventions.51
no. 1 (1988): 103–36. In addition to quantitative feedback surveys, more qualita-
49 Mariska G. Vlug et al., “The Development tive, interactive, and generative open-ended design testing sessions can
of an Instrument to Measure Factors That
let design teams gather stakeholders’ reactions, observe their inter-
Influence Self-Perceived Dignity,” Journal
of Palliative Medicine 14, no. 5 (May actions with the prototype, and elicit new re-designs from them.
2011): 578–86. The testing sessions become more like a workshop, in which
50 Beth Arburn Davis, “Development and respondents can sketch changes, interpret the prototype to work in
Validation of a Scale of Perceived Control the ideal way for them, and improvise how they would use the
Across Multiple Domains,” (PhD diss.,
thing in practice. Open-ended testing sessions are less about get-
Philadelphia College of Osteopathic
Medicine, 2004). ting a definitive evaluation of a project’s value, and more about
51 Christopher A. Le Dantec and W. Keith leading to a next version of the prototype, with a gradual refine-
Edwards, “Designs on Dignity: Percep- ment of the hypotheses and details of the intervention. These ses-
tions of Technology on the Homeless,” sions also can take place in context—where the design team places
in CHI ’08 Proceedings: Design in Dignity
the prototype in the field to observe whether people notice it,
(New York: ACM, 2008), 627–36; and
Asam Almohamed and Dhaval Vyas, engage with it, know how to use it, and to see how they interact
“Designing for the Marginalized: A with it.52
Step Towards Understanding the Lives Lab testing of more discrete new interventions—such as
of Refugees and Asylum Seekers,” in new legal documents, technologies, or visuals—also can be use-
DIS 2016 Companion: Proceedings of the
ful to rank different versions of a new prototype and to refine
2016 ACM Conference on Designing
Interactive Systems (New York: ACM, a vision of the details and composition that must engage and
2016), 165–68. inform stakeholders. Especially with legal design work, where
52 Bilge Mutlu and Jodi Forlizzi, “Robots many interventions involve making complex and intimidating
in Organizations: The Role of Workflow, things more approachable and actionable, lab tests can help design
Social, and Environmental Factors in
teams identify what patterns, interactions, and communication
Human-Robot Interaction,” in Human-
Robot Interaction (HRI), 2008 3rd techniques are most promising. Lab evaluations simulate how
ACM/IEEE International Conference On a person might encounter a new legal communication or pro-
Human–Robot Interaction (New York: duct; have the person try to use this prototype; and then have
ACM, 2008), 287–94. them recount their experience, rank the prototype on a number
53 Kleimann Communication Group,
of predefined factors, and propose iterations to refine it.53 If the
Know Before You Owe: Evolution of
the Integrated TILA–RESPA Disclosures legal design work is a new visual communication, then standard
(Rockville, MD: Consumer Financial instruments can be used to empirically measure the prototype
Protection Bureau, 2012); Pedro Giovanni in terms of its ability to “perform” for users. Measurements can
Leon-Najera, “Privacy Notice and include speed of comprehension, accuracy of comprehension, and
Choice in Practice,” (PhD diss., Carnegie
positive user experience.54
Mellon University, 2014); Stefania
Passera, “Enhancing Contract Usability If the prototype is more of a civic technology or service, some
and User Experience Through Visual- outcome measurements from an early field run might also include
ization: An Experimental Evaluation,” the number of people who engage with the technology, those who
16th International Conference on return to it, and those who recommend it to others.55 Other possible
Information Visualization (Washington,
measurements in the short term—to show the performance of the
DC: IEEE Computer Society, 2012);
Aleecia M. McDonald et al., “A
technology—include the number of bugs, breakdowns, or levels of
Comparative Study of Online Privacy attrition.
Policies and Formats,” in International
Symposium on Privacy Enhancing
Technologies Symposium, eds. Ian
Goldberg and Mikhail J. Athallah
(Berlin: Springer, 2009): 37–55; Omri

DesignIssues: Volume 36, Number 3 Summer 2020 13

 More work needs to be done in the legal design community
to produce a standard set of metrics around early-stage legal
design prototypes. The instruments used to assess the different
visual, technological, service, organizational, spatial, or policy
designs might differ, depending on these different forms. Still, a
consistent set of factors could be prioritized. A draft of these legal
design testing metrics might include the following features:
1. Usability: Does the thing improve people’s ability to use
the legal system, and their sense of a positive experience
while doing so?
2. Procedural justice: Does it enhance users’ sense of
procedural justice—that the legal system is fair,
transparent, and “for them”?
3. Engagement: Does the thing affect people’s willingness
to engage with legal tasks—to use the legal system to
resolve problems and to do the tasks within the system?
4. Legal capability: Does the thing improve people’s ability
to efficiently, sufficiently understand the complex legal
information needed to deal with the system? Does the
thing help them to figure out how the law applies to
their specific situation, and enable them to make an
informed, actionable decision?
5. Resolution: Does the thing help people to resolve a prob-
lem, to protect their interests, and to achieve a positive
outcome for themselves (and those around them)?
6. Administrative burden: Does the thing significantly
reduce the amount of time and money that people
must spend to complete the tasks in the legal procedure
and get to a resolution?

Building a Stronger Methodology for a Full Cycle

of Legal Design
The methodology of legal design can draw from a variety of social
science, design, and computer science fields to create new strate-
gies for reform, as well as to measure and evaluate new interven-
tions before scaling them and advocating for widespread policy
change. These literatures include HCI, research through design,
Ben-Shahar and Adam Chilton,
“Simplification of Privacy Disclosures:
applied ethnography, procedural justice, open innovation, and
An Experimental Test,” The Journal of agile governance.
Legal Studies 45, no. 2 (2016): S41–67. The pieces that follow in this volume give more examples of
54 Stefania Passera, “Flowcharts, how legal design is being made into a coherent discipline, and how
Swimlanes, and Timelines: Alterna-
it is being brought into the reform of court systems, data protection
tives to Prose in Communicating Legal–
Bureaucratic Instructions to Civil Ser-
policy-making, community justice, housing rights, and beyond. As
vants,” Journal of Business and Technical
Communication 32, no. 2 (2018): 229–72.
55 Knight Foundation, “Assessing Civic
Tech: Case Studies and Resources for
Tracking Outcomes,” March 2015, at
www.networkimpact.org.

14 DesignIssues: Volume 36, Number 3 Summer 2020

 further work is done to bring a design approach into the various
areas of law, communities need a sustained effort to refine meth-
ods for later in the cycle, as well as to better evaluate and supple-
ment the methods listed here.
Past the exploratory part of the design work, when proto-
types harden into pilots, more work is needed to identify methods
that can take the creative, experimental design approach into the
stricter, more controlled field trials. A crucial missing part of many
legal design efforts currently is the pre-trial and pre-pilot field test-
ing. In this phase of going from lab tests to field tests, there is a
need for “soft trial” tests which involve actual human behavior, but
which do not lock the solution into a final version. After this field
run, then traditional social science evaluations using observational
trials and randomized controlled trials can be used to determine
how the interventions perform. As empirical legal studies as a field
grows, and as more trials occur in the legal system, legal design
can become integrated in this work and better create and vet new
interventions to be piloted. Legal design thus can generate knowl-
edge about what things can best improve people’s outcomes and
experiences in the legal system.56
Legal design also can become integrated into the field of
behavioral science. As behavioral labs experiment with nudges
and heuristics to see how small interventions can drive better,
evidence-based policymaking, legal design can borrow their meth-
ods and integrate them into their exploratory design work, as well
as their lab and field evaluations.57 When legal design focuses on
getting to widespread influence, then literature on innovation
diffusion, borrowed from management science and health care,
56 D. James Greiner and Andrea Matthews,
can provide methodologies for understanding both strategies and
“Randomized Control Trials in the United
States Legal Profession,” Annual Review evaluations for scaling and replicating new interventions.58
of Law and Social Science 12, no. 1 In future research, legal design practitioners and research-
(February 2, 2016): 295–312. ers must also define what long term indicators of their work’s
57 Richard H. Thaler and Will Tucker, impact might be, and use participatory processes to do so. Some
“Smarter Information, Smarter Con-
indicators could be around people’s quality of life after having a
sumers,” Harvard Business Review 91,
no. 1 (2013): 44–54; and Alexandra
legal problem, including their poverty levels, community health,
Fiorillo et al., Applying Behavioral Eco- levels of violence, faith in the government, mental health, stability
nomics to Improve Microsavings Out- of housing, payment of taxes, children’s attendance of schools, eco-
comes (Cambridge, MA: ideas42, 2014). nomic productivity, and willingness to use the courts and other
58 James W. Dearing and Jeffrey G. Cox,
legal services. Greater methodological work on long-term justice
“Diffusion of Innovations Theory, Princi-
ples, and Practice,” Health Affairs 37,
outcomes can help tie legal design work into policy-making and
no. 2 (February 5, 2018): 183–90; and anti-poverty efforts beyond the justice system that can demonstrate
Karsh, “Beyond Usability.” a wider purpose of legal innovation for society.

DesignIssues: Volume 36, Number 3 Summer 2020 15

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