Creating an interactive experience for the Constitution Annotated
Background
For my capstone project, at the University of Maryland, I had the opportunity to work with a team of four to design an educational application for the Library of Congress’ Constitution Annotated resource.
Project Goals
To understand how users with and without a legal background seek information
Increase users’ searchability of the Constitution Annotated
Make the Constitution Annotated mobile application better for research and educational purposes
My Role
UX designer, team of 5
Conduct background research
Create prototypes
Manage and organize the work for the team
About the Constitution Annotated
The Constitution Annotated (CONAN) is a text that contains legal analysis and interpretation of the Constitution based on Supreme Court case law that is available online at congress.gov and also as a mobile application.
Design Process
This project was done over the course of two semesters starting in the Fall of ‘18 with a focus on user research. There were a few pivots in the project and more research occured in the Spring, where there was more of a focus on design.
Initial Research
The Library of Congress was interested in learning more about the following user groups and so our research focused on learning about their needs and behaviors.
User groups:
Law librarians
Law students
K-12 educators
Subject Matter Expert Interviews
In order to gather background information about about how these groups do research, interviews were conducted with subject matter experts. This was important to do in order for our team to ask the right questions and understand the basics about legal research
Surveys
We also conducted surveys with 21 law librarians and three k-12 educators to gain more background information about the user groups.
Contextual Interviews
Contextual interviews allowed our team to understand details of research such as time of day for research, why research is being done, what websites they are using , how they store and organize information, and what they produced for their final deliverables.
Interview Participants:
5 law students
4 Educators
2 Law librarians
During the interviews we also asked participants to find legal information they needed using the Constitution Annotated, which helped to reveal issues within the current mobile application.
Analyzing the data
From all of the interviews our team gathered a lot of data which we then used an affinity diagram to organize the data.
Being able to create and move physical sticky notes made it much easier for the team to work quickly and efficiently.
This identity model was created to show the different types core identity elements of users.
Change in Project Focus
Our final design focused on finding a group of undergraduate students who would benefit from using the CONAN. The main question then was:
What group of students would benefit from using the CONAN?
Our team started by looking through syllabi to see what classes students were learning about the Constitution. Through on-campus interviews with students and professors, we decided to focus on creating a tool to assist students and professors to prepare for mock trials using CONAN.
What is mock court?
Mock court is simulated trial that is conducted as part of a course where students act as defendants, prosecutors, and supreme court judges. In these classes, students develop critical thinking skills and learn how to form arguments. Mock court provides an opportunity for students to learn how court cases are conducted.
Design Impacts from Interviews
Most of the team’s focus was on creating a desktop app because we found that undergrad students don’t use phones to conduct research.
Because professors supply all of the resources for hypothetical court cases, we focused on creating an app that could provide all this information to students.
It was important to make sure that new Supreme Court cases were easily accessible in the app, especially for professors who relied on them to create case studies.
Testing & Iterating on Designs
Our team then created a high level workflow for professors and students. I helped to create a paper prototype which I was able to test with a professor to get more feedback to create a high-fidelity design.
Final Designs
The new design allows for professors to use the app to do research and create assignments for their mock trial class. Students are also able to go to this app, do their own research and complete assignments. The full prototype of the app for the professor can be viewed here and the student side of the app can be viewed here.
App Highlights:
Content is easier to explore and allows users to create their own documents within the app.
Users can edit content they’ve created and share it with other colleagues.
The user can collect and organize content in a way that is meaningful to them.
Homepage
Provides users with the most recent Supreme Court cases. This information is located here because through our research we found that professors wanted to know the most recent Supreme Court cases in order to help them create mock court cases for their classes.
Users will easily be able to tell if any changes have been made to the CONAN because it will be listed on the homepage.
Provides users multiple ways to search within the app, and also includes an advanced search feature.
Essay content
Essays contain clickable links to Supreme Court cases, providing users with a way to do further research.
The original application had footnotes that are now moved to the side of the essay so that as the user reads the notes will scroll along with the essay content.
Users can also access a list of key cases mentioned in the essay that are located on the right.
Creating a new document
Both students and professors can create new documents within the app.
Users also have the ability to export the document or share a link to the document.
A saved items list is available at all times for a quick reference of all saved material.
Assignment section
Students and professors can create and store assignments related to different classes.
Users can sort the documents they created by date and search within their saved items.
Lessons Learned
This project gave me insight into what it’s like working with a real client and how it’s important to understand the client’s needs and be flexible to pivot.
I learned a lot about gathering data quickly from the on-campus guerilla interviews that we were able to conduct with students and professors.
