UX for the Public — Gordon Chadwick

Overview

Most people only interact with the judicial system at the worst moments of their lives — a traffic violation, a divorce, a summons for jury duty. The last thing they need is a website that speaks in legalese and buries the information they need under layers of navigation designed for lawyers.

This project was a ground-up redesign of a US state's judicial branch website — covering the court system's public face across every county. The immediate driver was a CMS migration to Drupal. The real opportunity was bigger: unify a fragmented experience, modernize a system that hadn't kept pace with its users, and make the courthouse genuinely accessible to the people it serves.

The challenge was designing for two audiences with almost nothing in common — the general public navigating a stressful and unfamiliar system, and legal professionals who depend on the site daily and need fast, precise access to case data and court information.

My Role

User Interviews Usability Testing Persona Development Content Strategy Card Sorting Tree Testing

Research Approach

The two-audience problem shaped everything. General public users and legal professionals navigate differently, tolerate different levels of complexity, and arrive with completely different mental models of how a court system works. Designing for one without the other means failing both.

For the general public, research focused on the highest-volume tasks: finding a case, understanding jury duty obligations, and accessing basic legal information. For legal professionals, the priority was speed and precision — they know what they need and resent having to hunt for it.

Gov.UK served as a north star for the plain language legal information section. The principle was simple: legal information shouldn't require a law degree to understand. Topics like divorce, traffic violations, and small claims court were rewritten from scratch with plain language as the design constraint, not an afterthought.

Key Findings

01 The public and legal audiences needed fundamentally different entry points. General public users arrived with task-first mental models ("I need to find my court date") while legal professionals navigated by document type and case number. A single navigation structure couldn't serve both — persona-based pathways were essential from the homepage down.

02 Legal jargon was the primary barrier for public users. Terms that court staff use interchangeably — "filing," "docket," "motion" — meant nothing to someone showing up for jury duty for the first time. Plain language was the difference between a user finding what they needed and giving up to call the courthouse.

03 High-volume tasks were buried. The most common reasons people visit a court website — jury duty, case lookup, paying a fine — were not prominently surfaced. They required users to already know the right terminology to find them. Restructuring around task frequency rather than organizational hierarchy had an immediate impact on findability.

Impact & Outcomes

↑ Plain language legal information section launched — the first of its kind for this court system, modeled on Gov.UK's approach to accessible public service content

What I Learned

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Opening the Courthouse Doors: Redesigning Public Access to Justice