Supreme Court Access

We worked closely with Supreme Court Registry staff and Court users to design a service offering that brings clarity, not the confusion court users typically find.

Staff had previously relied on behind the scenes ‘hacks’ to get the functionality they need. An in-depth design research phase led into intensive participatory design sprints.
We used these participatory methods to create a web-based service with robust functionality that is sustainable and scalable.

In a sector based on complex language, we found every opportunity to embed the principles of communications design to make challenging concepts and instructions accessible to the layperson.

Working directly with the highest court in the state was a significant opportunity to show how transformational human-centred and participatory design can be. The Court has seen tangible improvements to their everyday assets, particularly their website.

The work we delivered on user archetypes has already been included in their training materials and is now helping frontline staff understand their users.

The enthusiasm and dedicated involvement of the Supreme Court team showed us the value of this process, and we are now in talks to deliver a training course to build the Court’s capability to use design methods and thinking.

Design research and archetype development showed us the experience of Supreme Court users is influenced by four key experiences (such as having a personal support network) – not whether they are a lawyer or a self-represented litigant. This was a groundbreaking discovery for Court staff, who believed lawyers as a user group shouldn’t have needs and “should be able to help themselves”.

This key finding helped us convince the Court that lawyers’ needs require responding to. Service outcomes were then designed to make the court more accessible not only for self-represented litigants, but for the first time, also for lawyers.

COVID-19 lockdowns struck midway through the project. We are incredibly proud of rapidly pivoting to remote research and delivering a body of work while supporting our project team – Paper Giant and Supreme Court – through the challenges that arose.

Our original design sprint approach was incompatible with the Zoom format, so we re-designed it mid-flight, breaking up each round into smaller pieces to “ping pong” work back and forth.

Homework exercises and asynchronous ideation led to a quality and breadth of thinking from our participants that we believe was better than what would have been produced in a traditional environment.