Legal Software: Passera: Report on the Legal Design Jam at KU Leuven, April 2014

marți, 1 iulie 2014

Passera: Report on the Legal Design Jam at KU Leuven, April 2014

Stefania Passera of Aalto University has posted a report on the Legal Design Jam held at KU Leuven , 4 April 2014.

Here are excerpts from the post:

The first Belgian Legal Design Jam has been organized on 4th April, in beautiful and ancient Leuven. The Jam was hosted at KU Leuven by the Interdisciplinary Centre for Law and ICT (ICRI) and it was aimed at providing the students of the LLM Research Master in Law (KU Leuven and Tilburg University) with a hands-on experience of how design thinking and doing can be applied to make legal texts more user-friendly.

A big thanks for making this Jam possible goes to ICRI’s superladies Veronica Donoso Navarrete, Ellen Wauters, Shuki Tang and Prof. Peggy Valcke, as well as Microsoft EMEA, who provided us the chance to work on their Terms of Use and Sale from the Microsoft Online Store. [...]

Scope of the Jam and results

During this Jam we worked on the Terms of Use and Sale from the Microsoft Online Store, thinking of different ways to make the document more user-friendly. Six teams worked complementary, each at improving a particular aspect of the document. The teams had only 3 hours of work to move from concept and paper sketches to a digital mock-up of their proposed solution, but they succeeded brilliantly in coming up with concrete, fresh ideas.

Team “User-friendly summary”

The challenge picked up by this team was to create a user-friendly summary to create a easy-access, visually pleasant overview of the content of the Terms of Use. Users without a legal background find it hard to read through a long legal document to find the information that interest them: a user-friendly summary provides a simpler overview of the topic, so the readers can find their “direction” through the clauses and drill-down only when it matters.

The team thought of a visual user-friendly summary inspired by Microsoft’s tiles motiv. In their proposal, they suggest that every topic in the summary works as a link to the relevant text. [...]

For more details, images, and excerpts of the final result, please see the complete post.

HT @stewiekee