Design Standards for Court & Government Forms
A Human-Centered Rubric to Evaluate a Form
Forms are not just pieces of paper. They’re tools for people to get their story across to a powerful judge, clerk, administrator, lawyer, or someone else who can decide about their future.
How — and if — you fill in a government form can determine if:
- you get to stay in your rental home, or you get evicted
- a company saying you owe them money can garnish your wages or bank account
- you get a restraining order against someone harassing you, or threatening you with domestic violence
- your past criminal record gets masked, sealed, or expunged
- you can get your name and gender changed
- you can get a guardianship of a child whose parents aren’t able to take care of them.
From an Institution’s to a User’s Perspective
Court forms matter a lot to high stakes financial, housing, and family matters. But often they’re designed within local state or county court groups that are focused on court needs:
- How a local judge works, and how they like to see people’s information and claims.
- How a local clerk works, and how they process forms and enter them into a case management system.
- How things have been done in the past, and upholding that accumulation of precedents.
That said, many court teams, access to justice commissions, and community advocates are open to switching this institutional point of view. Especially with more focus on the justice gap and high numbers of people without lawyers (self-represented litigants), there’s more attention to how court forms can be more accessible, user-friendly, and supportive to people trying to participate in the justice system.
This embrace of the user’s perspective, comes with a big question:
How do we know if our court forms are usable & effective for the public?
How can our team figure out what’s going wrong with our forms, and how to make them more accessible & effective for litigants?
A Design Rubric for User-Focused Evaluation
In our Lab’s work with court partners and legal aid partners, we’ve run many local user testing sessions of court forms to see how people try to use them, where they get frustrated, and what helps them get it done.
Especially now with the Filing Fairness Project and our eviction prevention work, our focus on users’ experience of forms has increased. Our team has been gathering form pdfs from around the country, to see what kinds of forms tenants need to fill in to defend themselves against eviction in California, Michigan, Virginia, Ohio, Alaska, and beyond.
We’ve been using our past user testing findings and our knowledge of key design principles to synthesize a rubric that can help more court teams do user-focused form evaluation. This includes deep qualitative review of different forms, with team members sharing notes about ‘what works’ and ‘what doesn’t’ for a given form. This deep review may be helpful for the committee in charge of that single form. But it can be hard to replicate or scale to the many other forms & jurisdictions that need review.
So, to that end, I synthesized all of our past user testing and team review of forms into a Form Design Rubric. It can be used by Judicial Councils, Administrative Offices of the Courts, A2J Commissions, community groups, and university researchers who are interested in finding out “Are my court forms user-friendly & effective? And how can we redesign them to increase the court’s accessibility & equity?”
The Form Design Rubric has 11 categories for evaluation. Each category can be scored 1–5 (or even a 0 if the performance is truly that bad).
Forms Are Services
Notably, the Form Design Rubric is not just about plain language & visual design. Though these are often the factors discussed around forms’ accessibility, they are not the sole criteria by which to judge a form.
Rather, this Rubric recognizes that the form is a service — with a “before”, “during”, and “after”. The form is not just effective if it’s understandable and clear. It’s only effective if people are able to find it and trust it (the “before”). And if people are able to complete it, file it, and complete all the other steps necessary for it to be valid (the “after”).
Thus, the Form Design Rubric has evaluation categories around Discoverability and Branding (for the “before”) and around Pricing, Time, Data, and Next Steps (for the “after”).
Who Should Use the Rubric?
The Rubric can be used internally within a court or legal team, to get an initial understanding of where the form’s strengths and weaknesses are, as a tool for users. This could happen within a Forms Committee, a self-help center, or an Access to Justice Commission.
The Rubric should then also be used externally with community members, past litigants, prospective litigants, and advocates. The Rubric can be used to administer interviews, surveys, and data-gathering with these stakeholders.
Court researchers or university teams could use the Rubric to structure a 15–30 minute conversation with community members, getting their scores in the 11 categories. In addition to the scores, the questions can also be open-ended prompts to get more qualitative information about these factors.
The Rubric can also gather feedback from lawyers, navigators, and other advocates who have repeated interactions with people trying to fill in the forms or trying to litigate their case after the form has been filed. These advocates will have repeat experience and also be able to see the down-the-road effects of certain form choices — especially around the Complexity category.
That said, the advocates’ scores should be balanced against the community members’. We might see advocates scoring a form high, because it asks many detailed questions about claims and defenses. The advocates may feel the form is effective because it’s trying to elicit lots of possible information that can help a person later in the case, and also give them key information about what matters in the legal proceedings.
But community members’ scores might give a different read. They might score a form that asks many detailed questions as overly burdensome or confusing. They might say that this kind of form would push them to disengage or abandon the process.
What the Rubric’s Results Can Do
The Form Design Rubric will not tell a Forms Committee or a community group the exact path of what to do, and how to balance out different stakeholders’ opinions about the best design of a form.
But the Form Design Rubric can structure these feedback and input sessions. It ensures that key factors are being considered, to ensure that people’s needs, protections, and empowerment is central to these important pieces of paper.
After many stakeholders review a form with the rubric, a Forms Committee should have an agenda. It will have the hotspots where the form is ranking low. These are the places to work with professional visual designers, legal service experts, and community memers to improve the form. This might include work to:
- Clean up the visual design of the form, with more white space, alignment, organization, and narrative flow.
- Provide more context, support, and off-ramps on a form webpage, cover sheet, or text message flow.
- Improve discoverability with SEO techniques, partnerships with tech platforms, improvement of court websites, and links with other agencies.
- Simplify and digitize notarization, signatures, payments, fee waivers, and filing options.
You can check out my earlier writings on designing a better court form, to start operationalizing what you find out from the rubric.
Can You Use this Rubric for Digital Forms and Tools?
We built this Design Rubric for a paper form or a digital PDF/.doc version of a form. It’s for a static letter-sized surface that a person is supposed to fill in. That might be with a print-out, or on a screen.
We didn’t create the Design Rubric for interactive form tools, that people usually call document assembly tools, expert systems, or guided interviews. That said, many of the categories still apply to the digital tools versions of forms.
We are working on another Design Rubric for court form document assembly tools, that courts can use to evaluate these interactive forms. This second Rubric will have additional categories unique to web applications, but will still retain the categories in this first Rubric.
Then, Quantitative Evaluation of Forms
This Rubric is a tool to evaluate whether a form is *likely* to be effective with court users. It’s a set of principles and heuristics to get input, to make the strongest possible version of the form.
That said, court leaders will need another, complementary evaluation strategy to see if the forms are *actually* effective in making the court system more accessible, usable, and equitable.
The Rubric should not be the only tool that a Forms Committee or Access to Justice Committee uses to see if their forms are human-centered and accessible. Use the Rubric to make the best possible form design, website design, and process design. But then start gathering quantitative and qualitative data about how it works in practice.
This means gathering information about the form-related legal outcomes for a court user. Often this will be done through gathering court administrative data, as well as running reviews with clerk and judicial teams and surveys with court users.
These legal outcomes can indicate if a form is, in fact, increasing appearance rates, ongoing participation in the court, procedural justice, and substantive outcomes.
If possible, then the team might also track longer-term life outcomes after the legal process is over. Is the conflict or crisis resolved? Does a person reduce their debt or financial stress? Is their housing and family more stable? Do they have more trust in the court and the government? These can be gathered through data-tracking in other public services, watching court records for new cases, and administering surveys and interviews with past court users.
This legal and life outcome evaluation can complement the Form Design Rubric — to see if this well-designed tool is indeed having the intended effect of improving the justice system, and helping a person through a legal crisis.
Is the Rubric Missing Anything?
When you use the Rubric, please be sure to note if you’re getting feedback that doesn’t seem to fit in any of the 11 categories.
Are community members, advocates, court staff, or others flagging another concern — something that would prevent a person from finding this form, filling it in, or filing it correctly?
Please let us know! We will refine and grow this Rubric accordingly, based on other factors that we haven’t come across yet in our own design research.
Good luck with making your local forms more discoverable, usable, and impactful, as one key part of greater access to justice.
