What ‘Law Makers’ should learn from ‘App Makers’
Laws are essential for smooth and efficient functioning of a civilised society. Laws are meant to regulate the life of citizens. Law makers around the world are entrusted by citizens to create laws for a fair and just society. This is the theory behind law making. The practical reality is that laws are the biggest impediment to a vibrant and growing economy. Law makers continue to make laws in a manner similar to law makers of 19th century. Citizens of many countries like India have lost faith in law making and enforcement. Laws and legal system have become the biggest catalyst for corruption. Is there any way out? Yes and app makers can teach that way to the law makers!
The first thing law makers should take inspiration for is ‘User Experience’ (UX) design. Whenever an app developer starts app development, he or she has to do UX design first. User experience design involves analysing user personas, activities, needs, problems and capabilities. The app developer has to go and research these by reading as well as by conducting field interviews, observations and experiments. App developers analyse the complete life cycle of the app with respect to the user. The app developer also analyses each micro-interaction with the app. This level of detailed user analysis goes into designing a high quality app. How many of our laws are designed in such a way? Laws are generally made not designed.
The other thing about good scalable design is that it should be minimal. Look at iPhone and new Apple TV remote. It has very few buttons. The more the buttons the more the confusion to the user. Similarly laws should be less in number and easier to understand. Laws should not be only for lawyers to understand. Laws are for citizens so they should be able to understand them by self study. In India many people learn MS Office by taking formal classes at training institutes. Who has taken such classes for iOS and Android apps? The role of lawyers should be like UX designers and coders. They should be behind the app (law in this case!). User should be able to learn the app’s user interface himself / herself (law’s interface in this case).
Good design is functional and easy to learn. How many laws are functional. I have heard that US tax code has more than 1 million words. Indian Prime Minister recently declared that he will remove more than 1,000 old acts. So we have more than a thousand laws!. Who can remember them? I do not think even big shots in the legal system remember or understand everything. Then the legal system comes out with a commandment : ‘ignorance of law is no excuse’. Analogically it is like Apple/Google/Microsoft making a rule that if you do not press correct button you will be sent to jail. Who can remember everything. Laws are still like MS DOS commands. World has moved on to iOS and Android.
I know that legal wizards will say that laws are complex piece of text. They cannot be made simpler. App developers also use to say this before iOS and UX design became a trend. Laws can at least become more visual. Research over last many years has revealed that humans need ‘visual thinking’ to clarify stuff. Stanford university even has a course on this. Visual thinking is used extensively by app developers to clarify stuff to the users. Some times you have to make things easier using icons, graphics, charts etc. Plain text is very boring. Law makers are some how against visual language. They prefer the written word. World has moved beyond the written word towards visual thinking. Written word was easy to publish in the 19th century but pictures were costly to print. Now this technical issue is not there. DOS was very difficult to learn. iOS is easy enough for usage by even a 2 year old child. What’s the difference? Its the use of sensory languages and lack of focus on the written word.
Laws should be field tested before making them mandatory over vast countries like USA and India. Law makers should learn from lean startup movement. Some of the flaws in laws will become obvious if they are field tested in a smaller area before making them law of the land. Laws are generally created by a bloated bureaucracy and are created in the same way as they were created in 18th and 19th century. Iterations of law are very slow to come. Field testing can accelerate the process of iterations. Startups do this every day.
A/B testing is a technique for getting user feedback. 2 different things are shown to 2 different groups of users and the usage noted and analysed. I read somewhere that Google has tested various shades of blue colour before finalising a particular blue for the hyperlinks in Google Ads. This results in more clicks. Laws can use this technique for getting faster feedback. Yes moral issues need to be kept in mind but A/B testing can be used for things like legal forms and compliance work.
Over the last 100 years a lot of research has been done on psychology and genetics. Many laws still assume that people do all crimes consciously. Psychology tells that people do not follow if then else approach. People react based on various things including psychology and biology. Here again UX design helps, as app developers know this fact, they design apps which are lighter on people’s brain. They choose colors and content which motivate people to do certain stuff and not do certain other stuff. Game designers focus on indirect control. Laws generally focus on direct control using police, courts, prison, penalty etc.
Analytics is another area where law makers need to learn from app makers. For laws to be fair they need to react in real time. Its no use penalising some one for something that was done months or years ago when a pro-active law can stop crime in real time. Stopping crime is more important than sending people to jail. App makers take usage data of apps very seriously. App makers try to experiment with different things based on data collected. They try to deduce the usage patterns of users using big data (a term which refers to analysis of big sets of data). Such feedback is based on actual usage data and is sometimes very good source of knowing about user pains and gains.
Another suite of techniques which I think can do wonders for government machinery is the usage of agile processes. Apps are not created using fixed budgets and fixed development schedule. Great companies like Google use Agile or similar methods like Scrum and Kanban etc to develop apps. Many government institutions have corruption and associated laws to counter corruption because of fixed budgets and schedules. The motto of agile is that life is too complex to be planned. Many laws are just there to enforce compliance to a plan. 5 year plans and budgets are such laws. App companies do not follow fixed plans. Change and iteration are good words not bad. Agile focuses on real time or smaller time boxed actions instead of huge planning exercises. Usage of agile processes coupled with visual thinking will make law enforcement more effective and government machinery run in a way similar to companies like Google, Facebook etc.
Thus I think time has come for law makers to exit 19th century mode of law making and enter 21st century mode of law making and enforcement.
Note about Author : I am a certified accountant who had written India’s first book on mobile app development using Java language way back in 2003.
