Procedural justice is a progressive concept in criminal justice with proven positive outcomes. The theory being  that when court users are shown respect, given a chance to be heard, perceive the system as fair and unbiased, and understand the legal process then compliance with court orders increases and recidivism decreases. 

With this in mind we redesigned the user experience at the busy Criminal Court in downtown Manhattan to exhibit the elements of procedural justice and more adequately serve defendants and their families. We partnered with the Center for Court Innovation (national leader in justice reform), the Mayor's Office for Criminal Justice, and New York City Criminal Court. On this project I was responsible for project planning, designing and facilitating workshops, user experience research, service design, client engagement and project management.  

Research, with an emphasis on empathy for all court users,  was extremely important to this user experience and service design project. Initially we began with informal observational research at the courthouse and in the courtroom to fully understand the process and daily activity on-site. We organized and conducted interviews and focus groups with court judges, security officers, Legal Aid Society attorneys, and court users to hear perspectives of various stakeholders. 

Defendants and their families were the hardest user group to reach, yet the most important to our project. Faced with this challenge, I developed personas – profiles of hypothetical users – that our client team adopted for a day of experiential research to better connect and empathize with the people we were designing for. In this case the personas included users with specific needs such as a Spanish-speaking defendant, Chinese-speaking visitor, physically disabled defendant, visually impaired individual, mother with a young child, and a family member of a defendant. The adoption of these personas allowed team members to build empathy for users and identify specific needs that might otherwise not be visible.

The Center for Court Innovation was collaborative and had lots of ideas about how best to express the tenets of procedural justice. The resources for the project were limited, so we were diligent in selecting the points where a redesign would have the greatest impact. I facilitated collaborative workshops with subject matter experts and behavioral scientists to identify these areas ripe for design interventions and build consensus for a design plan that satisfied the many competing priorities.

Looking at the statistics from the court helped frame the most highly trafficked areas to ensure that we found reached the greatest volume. 

Out of
248,973 cases
in 2015,
54% ended at arraignment

The majority of courthouse visitors passed through the arraignment courtrooms, so we anchored our user flow mapping to these locations. We identified all important signposts on the user journeys throughout the criminal court. In this process we were looking for how to make the experience easier to understand, transparent, and communicative.

Unfortunately, the court process involves a lot of waiting time for defendants. A defendant can wait for hours before even meeting their lawyer. These  common situations create a great deal of uncertainty which quickly leads to anger and distrust in the system. We found ways to transform these unavoidable wait times into opportunities to share information about the process and educate visitors about their rights and the system at large. 

Installation of the physical changes to the space was completed in January 2018. These modifications along with behavioral interventions will be piloted and evaluated for impact over a six-month period. Read more about the project in Urban Omnibus article, Retrofit for Fairness.

Retrofit for Fairness , Urban Omnibus, February 2018