Jusbrasil — closing the justice gap (a UX Case Study)
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Resume of this case study:
• Problem: People need a way to find the right lawyer and trusted information.
• Process: Online Research > Interviews > Affinity Diagram > Heuristic Analysis > Persona Definition > Problem Statement > Visual Thinking > Paper Prototyping and Iteration > High Fidelity Prototype and Iteration.
• Key deliverable: High fidelity prototype
• Result: App that allows lawyers and clients to connect
”Our courts face a crisis of access. Eighty percent of low-income people have trouble obtaining legal representation or otherwise accessing the civil court system to protect their property, family, and livelihood.”
This phrase above represents a bit about Jusbrasil — a technology company that gathers the talent of engineers, designers and legal background people to solve old issues with new approaches.
Focused on making relevant legal information accessible and promoting the meeting of the guardians of the rights and duties of society — the lawyers — with the citizen, Jusbrasil presents itself as an integrating platform for these agents, impacting millions of Brazilians who need information access.
This was the starting point of my interest in solving the proposed challenge. The goal was to present a flow for an app, which should be developed for iOS and Android, based on user research to a high fidelity prototype.
I started the project with a thorough analysis of Jusbrasil’s business model, a structured survey that I sent to specific groups on social networks and my social network, and a series of interviews to gather more accurate insights into people’s needs and pain points.
With the collected data, I needed to organize all the information and better understand what the features would be and what flow I would focus on my project. To do so, I made a kind of affinity diagram using some evaluation points of a heuristic analysis with the pain points identified in the interviews.
However, it was not yet clear to me what problem to tackle. It was the right time to meet Alexander — the persona who helped me better understand users’ needs.
I’ve always heard that life is a box of surprises. And it opened to Alexander with a not-so-pleasant surprise: his wife filed for divorce because her life goals had changed and she would like to go another way.
Alexander then faced the need to resolve this legal issue but did not know where to look for information relevant to his case and who to look for to help him.
And it was from this question that came to the problem statement:
Everything became clearer after this process. So, drawing the flow of user needs to make the app conceptually and functionally fit was the best way I could find to start my ideation process.
I drew the first ideas and made a low fidelity paper prototype to test quickly.
This gave me elements to change some critical points and question others in the second flow.
That was when a question arose that made me wonder a lot about the decision I would make to proceed with the project.
At some point in the flow, some users reported that they were not comfortable writing about their personal affairs on a platform before talking to a lawyer. Also, they thought it was important for the user to be able to choose the lawyer from a list so they could contact them and then follow up with their case information.
On the other hand, some users reported not feeling uncomfortable reporting their cases — which would be briefly displayed in the lawyers’ specific application — for some interested lawyers to look for.
As stated earlier, the purpose of this app was to connect people with relevant information and the most appropriate attorneys to represent them in court.
Thus, I decided to go through the flow where the user should record the information of his case so that the app would get more structured data to select and present the cases to lawyers in his platform.
According to the proposed exercise, I would only have to show a simple flow of the app. I, therefore, decided that Alexander’s task was to find a lawyer who was interested in his case.
In the upper flow, the user accesses a list of evaluated and specialized lawyers in the area of the informed case, based on the little general information about the problem.
In the bottom flow, the user writes the case that will be shown on the lawyer's platform. And those who are interested in the case will contact the user.
After the decision, I started to develop a high fidelity prototype.
I should also show two screen interfaces on both platforms: iOS and Android.
As an iPhone user, I had to go deeper into Material Design rules to develop the interfaces for Android. However, I still need to do a further study and this exercise was excellent to arouse in me the desire to know a little more about this platform.
The prototype
This was the hi-fi prototype for this exercise.
Conclusion and Next Steps
This exercise was excellent for me.
It took a longer period of reflection on the flows and how I would make it easier to understand all the information I collected during the interviews and surveys.
Also, as stated earlier, designing for different platforms was very interesting.
For the next steps, I will definitely take some time to practice more Android development.
Thank you so much for your time.
