Work / Play
Responding to emergency situations using the tools of design.
Challenge
When cities began rolling out Emergency Rental Assistance Programs (ERAP) during the COVID-19 pandemic, many people did not know how to access available funds. LegalFAQ.org, a platform that provides information and resources to help people facing housing-related legal issues, wanted to change that. My challenge was to direct clients to rental assistance funds available in their state.
Many legal aid organizations similar to LegalFAQ.org were caught by surprise when they had to transition their services online during the pandemic, and many struggled to adapt. I wondered how we might create scalable guidance around basic design principles that would help legal professionals adjust their virtual presence in future emergency situations.
Approach
Time was of the essence, so I conducted a quick site audit and some ad hoc user research to pinpoint where users were getting stuck trying to find rental assistance funds. Informed by these findings, I designed an emergency alert banner and breadcrumb trail for the LegalFAQ.org homepage.
Inspired by Dana Chisnell’s “Field Guides to Ensuring Voter Intent”, I designed a series of short “Emergency Design Field Guides” that describe actionable steps legal organizations can take to ensure that they are still able to reach their clients no matter what.
Impact
My design nudges directs clients to the link for rental assistance funds in their state in two clicks. The simple changes reduce the amount of time and cognitive effort clients previously had to spend searching for ERAP funds.
Each volume of the Emergency Design Field Guide series focuses on a different aspect of virtual communication and is intended to quickly familiarize legal professionals who have little-to-no design experience with basic design principles. Publishing these guides empowers more legal professionals to connect with their clients virtually, when and where needed.
Team
Design Lead
Marina DeFrates
Advisor / Lawyer
Nora al Haider
Context
Legal system
Academia
Timeline
3 weeks
(Summer 2021)
Status
🚀 Shipped
Part I: Banners and breadcrumbs
1 / Website audit
After auditing the current LegalFAQ.org website, I found that it has two main purposes:
1. To provide accessible legal information. This flow is initiated by typing in the search bar.
2. To direct users to relevant legal, financial and other resources based on their location. This flow is initiated by clicking on one of the sections under "Get Help".
2 / User testing
I asked several participants to use the LegalFAQ.org website to locate ERAP funds available in their state. It became apparent that participants were using the search bar and getting lost in the information flow, rather than scrolling down to the resources under the "Get Help" heading.
“There's so much helpful information here, but for some parts, I don't really know until I scroll that it exists.”
- Participant
3 / Prototyping banners
Rather than redesigning the entire homepage, which would take significant time and investment, I decided to create a banner to alert website visitors about ERAP funds.
Most LegalFAQ.org clients access the website on their phones, so I began by designing for mobile.
4 / Leaving breadcrumbs
The homepage banner links to a search bar for clients to type their state, after which they are taken to the financial resources available in their state. I designed a full-width card in the same yellow as the banner to highlight the link to that state's ERAP funds, leaving a breadcrumb trail to visually signal to clients that they are on the right track.
Part II: Turning lawyers into designers
Approaching the design of LegalFAQ.org in response to the COVID emergency was not difficult, but it did take a bit of design thinking. Most legal professionals are not trained to think like this and have never been exposed to the basic tools of design, so we decided to use LegalFAQ.org and a few other projects to serves as case studies in which to distill some basic design guidance for legal professionals needing to adapt their virtual presence during emergency situations.
This took the form of short field guides that cover the following essential topics:
1. Website design
2. Content design
3. Visual design
4. Distribution channels
These field guides were made publicly available through the Stanford Legal Design Lab. Check them out below:
Reflection
Trying to navigate resources and information during emergency situations can be incredibly stressful for people, and keeping this experience top of mind reminded me to design with compassion and motivated me to quickly deliver an effective solution for people facing this situation. Distilling a design approach for a non-design audience also got me thinking at a larger scale about how we can democratize design tools and processes more often for many different audiences and situations.
I would have loved to dive deeper into LegalFAQ.org research and redesign to measure the impact the design nudges had, but working on this project helped me understand how to prioritize design decisions according to what is feasible in a time- or otherwise constrained environment.