Reimagining Access to Justice Through UX Design

Leveraging UX Design to Increase Access to Justice

Governments are now exploring the connections between UX design and access to justice with increasing interest. Notably, the Court of Justice in Thailand has adopted user-centered design thinking to improve and make its judicial system more user friendly and accessible. A major aim of this exercise in systemic reform is to create a responsive and inclusive judicial system that ultimately serves the needs of all stakeholders. I want to emphasize the importance of focusing on how UX design can enhance access to justice. Indeed, among other benefits, an effectively functioning and accessible court system that inspires public confidence, promotes sustainable development because “confidence in the judiciary ultimately affects confidence in the economy, influencing investment and consumption decisions made by companies and individuals….”

While we recognize access to justice as a fundamental right, its realization in practice has often been undermined by resource, political, and even technological concerns. Legal technologist Professor Richard Susskind has made the interesting assertion that people no longer see a court of law exclusively as a mere facilitator of access to justice. Instead, we now see a court of law as a service—particularly since the paradigm shift in the administration of justice that the advent of COVID-19 occasioned, effectively ushering in “the transition to technology-based justice,” continues to be the order of the day. This interesting and rather unconventional conception of a court of law as a service, instead of just a place, coupled with the unmistakable resilience of remote court hearings as one of the predominant modalities through which justice has been administered in a post-COVID-19 era, arguably creates opportunities for leveraging UX design as an important means of transforming court services. Improving users’ interactive experience with the court system ultimately promotes increased access to justice.

There are several ways in which we can leverage UX design to increase access to justice. One involves proactively incorporating UX design in the development of decision trees and diagnostic systems with the aim of enhancing the user experience of court users, especially self-represented litigants, who will be better empowered to understand their legal entitlements and obligations as a result. “Guides that help identify the options for resolution that are open to users [and] tools that can help nonlawyers organize their evidence and formulate their arguments…” would prove particularly useful in this context.

The use of AI and, in particular, generative AI (GenAI) technologies can facilitate the quick, efficient production of informational guides that can better assist court users, with no legal background, enabling people to better understand their legal rights and obligations across varied contexts, as well as to effectively organize their evidence and formulate their arguments when they are self-represented. Of course, as with every AI technology or application, ethical considerations must guide their deployment, particularly in a context where using them to promote increased access to justice.

Overcoming Barriers to Accessing Justice

Within Jamaica’s unique socio-cultural milieu, litigants and other court users often face formidable barriers to accessing justice. These barriers include, but are not limited to the following:

• an enduring backlog of cases that invariably affects the speed with which we can effectively dispose of matters entering the court system
• a shortage of courtrooms and other physical infrastructure necessary to facilitate the effective dispensation of justice
• the complexity of standard court language, which is challenging to understand for those Jamaicans who do not speak standard English or speak only some dialectal variation of standard English
• the challenges that self-represented court users with no legal background often face in understanding their legal rights and responsibilities

Leveraging UX Design to Increase Access to Justice in Jamaica

Against that backdrop, we can leverage UX design to promote increased access to justice in Jamaica by doing the following:

• Promoting the conducting of user research and usability testing to better understand the specific challenges and painpoints that members of the Jamaican populace face in accessing justice, especially those belonging to traditionally excluded and underserved groups. We can then contemplate and design tailor-made solutions to incrementally address their unique needs to positively impact their experience with the court system.
• Facilitating the creation of user-centered, user-friendly Web sites, digital platforms, and mobile apps that not only simplify court practices and procedures but also help Jamaican court users locate and access relevant legal information, resources, and other legal-aid services. This will be especially helpful to self-represented court users who do not possess specialized legal knowledge and would, therefore, have challenges deciphering and understanding their legal rights and responsibilities across various contexts. These digital platforms must also be oriented toward promoting inclusivity by incorporating features that contemplate and accommodate the needs of traditionally excluded groups, including Jamaicans with disabilities, Jamaicans who are socio-economically disadvantaged, and basilect-dominant Jamaicans.
• Supporting the development of engaging, culturally relevant educational materials and legal-literacy tools that we can present through interactive tutorials, videos, document templates, and step-by-step guides that clearly and engagingly break down complex legal concepts for self-represented court users with no legal background.
• Enabling the implementation of feedback mechanisms for digital platforms that facilitate access to legal services, allowing court users to report relevant issues and propose recommendations for improvement. Such interventions can especially be beneficial to victims of gender-based violence (GBV), who often face formidable barriers to accessing justice through the court system, particularly when they are economically disadvantaged. This can help make the court system more sensitive to the unique needs of victims of GBV, thereby allowing the introduction of critical reforms that reflect a sensitivity to those needs. In the final analysis, the court user’s interactive experience with the court system will only be enhanced in both the short-term and the long-term.
• Supporting the optimization of scheduling and resource-management strategies within the court system through the creation of scheduling systems that seek to optimize court dates based on, among other things, courtroom resources and the urgency of a matter. It can also help minimize gaps in the scheduling process, making the process by which courts schedule matters for hearing more efficient. This would, no doubt, be a welcome development in a context where there is notably a lack of physical infrastructure, in the form of courtrooms, necessary for the effective dispensation of justice in Jamaica.
• Empowering self-represented court users, in particular by supporting the implementation of mechanisms that enable them to track the status of their matter as it progresses through the court system, thereby enhancing, at least in some measure, their interactive experience and ultimate satisfaction with the court system.
• Improving efiling systems by making it easier for court users—and especially those who are self-represented—to file the documents that are necessary for the initiation and progression of matters in court. This intervention can help reduce physical paperwork, reduce the need for manual entry, expedite case processing, and also unburden court staff by giving them more time to dedicate to ensuring that the court system functions effectively and making it more convenient for use by court users. Indeed, it was recently announced that plans are underway to implement electronic filing within Jamaica’s court system. Thus, it would be useful for any efiling system to incorporate, as critical features, simplified forms that would be easy to complete and submit electronically, automated validation that would allow the detection of errors before submission, which would reduce the need for resubmission, and mobile optimization, would facilitate the filing of documents from any device at any time.

In Summary

Governments can leverage UX design to facilitate greater access to justice in several ways within the Jamaican context. Certainly—and to the extent that the user-centric approach that UX design champions is employed with strategic intentionality, it can improve the efficiency, transparency, usability, accessibility, and public trust in the legal processes that are crucial to promoting greater access to justice—particularly for traditionally excluded and underserved groups.