By Spencer Thieme, J.D. candidate, Harvard Law School
STUDENT VOICES: The views expressed below are those of the student author and do not necessarily reflect the position of the Access to Justice Lab.
The E-Government Act of 2002 was implemented to “enhance citizen access to Government information and services” by ensuring that governments made information digitally accessible to the public. Government websites, when effective, can make the process of filing for bankruptcy, divorce, restraining orders and other common legal requests easier. Unfortunately, the quality of these websites varies significantly. Some states, such as California, have court websites that are designed to efficiently direct visitors to relevant services and information. Others suffer from a lack of organization, confusing language, and poor formatting. Journalist Ezra Klein says the media is partially to blame for these websites not keeping up with the times: “[in the media, there’s] a ton of focus on politics, on elections, on big policy questions and fights and theories.” But, he continues, when a bill passes and “it doesn’t show up in people’s lives or even makes people’s lives worse because of how it is implemented, there’s often no outcry because there’s no attention, and so there are no fixes.” On all ends of the political spectrum, people can generally agree on one thing—efficiency is good, bureaucratic hoops are bad. Fixing these websites is a relatively easy and inexpensive method to expand accessibility to court systems and services. Three potential ways to do so are by (1) improving organization, (2) simplifying language, and (3) formatting for accessibility.
Improving Organization
Categorizing information, using AI chatbots, and making search bars more prominent are potential ways that government entities could improve the navigability of their websites. Part of what can make these websites burdensome to use is a lack of organization. For example, visitors looking to find a court form on Arkansas’s or Louisiana’s websites will be greeted with a long alphabetical list of every court form available. Arkansas includes bar card request forms and child support forms on the same page despite these forms having very different audiences. In Louisiana’s case, their layout means that users will have to sort through 37 pages worth of forms to find the ones they need. The list begins with three forms that are only useful to those seeking to renew, verify, or apply for an acupuncturist license application despite the fact that, as of 2018, only 81 of Louisiana’s nearly 4.6 million residents were licensed acupuncturists.
Private corporations, however, often incorporate the “Hick’s Hyman Law” (“Hick’s Law”) into their websites to improve organization. Hick’s Law is a design principle holding that people take longer to make decisions when presented with more stimuli. California and the United Kingdom have less stimuli on their pages in part because they organize their information by categories. A visitor seeking information on divorce, benefits, or small claims could simply click on that category and be directed to a more tailored list of forms.
Some state and local governments have also begun to employ AI chatbots to direct visitors to the information they seek. Chatbots can be helpful when designed properly but also run the risk of delivering incorrect information. New York City’s MyCity chatbot, for example, got into hot water for providing false legal advice.
Search bars can help decrease stimuli by enabling the visitor to directly look for one type of information. The United Kingdom’s website, for example, opens to a page with a large search bar—almost like Google. Where there is a search bar, however, it is important that it provides relevant results to the user. If a visitor enters the word “divorce” into the search bar of the Washington Courts website, they will be presented with 6277 documents; the first is a report from 1999 on the effects of post-divorce parenting on child well-being. The same search in gov.uk, by contrast, provides step by step information on how to obtain a divorce.
Simplifying Language
Another way to improve the usability of government websites is to use more colloquial language. On average, US adults read at the 7th-8th grade level; 22% do not speak English at home. However, many government websites use complicated language that may frustrate or delay a visitor’s ability to get the information they seek. Arkansas, for example, names its form for obtaining a temporary restraining order an “Ex Parte Order of Protection,” as opposed to “temporary restraining order.” US federal bankruptcy forms are titled by form number, such as “B3180V3,” and by a long description of their function, such as “Periodic Report Regarding Value, Operations, and Profitability of Entities in Which the Debtor’s Estate Holds a Substantial or Controlling Interest.” One readability-checking website rates that name at postgraduate level. It includes multiple legal terms of art: “Debtor” (which in this context refers not to anyone who owes money but instead to a particular litigant), “Estate,” and “Substantial or Controlling Interest.” As a form name, it is 20 words long.
Again, gov.uk provides a model for simplifying language without sacrificing the amount of information that is conveyed. It labels categories with language like “Money and Tax” and “Childcare and Parenting.”
Formatting for Accessibility
Ensuring that websites are accessible across different types of devices would further streamline users’ ability to gleam information from them. Of federal government websites, 41% are not cell-phone friendly. Another 42% are not accessible for users with disabilities. However, 9% more people own smartphones than computers (90% vs. 81%). With US government websites seeing, on average, more than 40 million visitors a day, improving accessibility for that 9% would be significant.
For this reason, website designers might want to pay attention to how their text appears on a mobile device, not just a desktop. California’s court forms page uses large font, minimal words, and high contrast, making it easy to read and navigate on a cell phone. Oregon’s page, by contrast, uses a small font and has sentences that run off the screen on a mobile device. New York forms retain their layout when downloaded to fill out on a cell phone; New Jersey forms do not. New Jersey could fix that issue by making the forms in PDF format so they appear the same on a mobile device.
Designers might also want to ensure that their layout is intuitive for users to navigate. Psychologist Paul Fitts developed Fitts’s Law in the 1950s to guide efforts to improve digital interfaces. Fitts’s Law is a design principle that holds that the larger a target is and the closer it is to the information it concerns, the faster a user will click the target. To access any form on Florida court’s website, a user needs to click a tiny pdf icon next to the form number, not the form name. The court could improve accessibility by making the title of the form into hypertext, to better incorporate Fitts’s Law.
Finally, the last two sets of recommendations—improving organization and simplifying language—would decrease the amount of content present on a page, allowing for larger fonts and less crowding. That alone would make the websites easier to understand on a cell phone.
None of these solutions are especially novel or difficult to implement. However, they could help prevent some of the headaches that come with using a difficult website. They might also free up courts’ time by making it easier for the general public to get the information and services they need rather than having to ask a court employee about a routine concern.
If you’re interested in more on this topic, listen to our Proof Over Precedent podcast episode.