Please visit the Legal Help Online Dashboard for best practice guides to audit and improve your legal help website.
The Legal Design lab has built the Legal Help Dashboard to share best practices with legal help website administrators.
We recommend you use that site as your main guide to improving your website’s performance, design, and content. We have this page as a hold-over from past years, in which we had started collecting resources here. We retain it, but our main updates are at the Legal Help Online Dashboard.
11-Point Checklist to Review a Legal Help Website
Our team compiled a checklist of key user-centered design issues to check for, on legal help websites. we derived it from user research & our expert evaluation of the many legal aid, court, and law help websites. Use the list to review for critical issues that can be fixed.
Use These Free Legal Icons and Images
We have created original legal help icons to represent different issues, process, navigation, organizations, and miscellaneous topics that anyone can download/copy and use freely on their digital designs.
In addition, we have collected photographs of people using the legal system, to do self-help tasks. These images can be used in online guides and other digital tools to illustrate what it looks like to be a user in the legal system.
Key Principles for Legal Help Design
This high-level guide to good legal design presents a checklist for 4 areas to improve the design of your site:
- Focusing On Your Users, and understanding how to design your site to fit their needs and preferences
- Compose Your Content + Structure with Simplicity & Supportive Guidance, to make sure that your website presents information with clear hierarchy and stages, with consistent and familiar language, and dominant-flow pathways for people to follow
- Provide Rich, Clear Interactions, that let your users feel progress, with limited navigation and choices, and with multiple modes to get tasks done
- Make Content User-Friendly, in mobile-friendly formats, with clear relationships, strong visuals, plain language, and short snippets