Accenture Industry X.O Consulting

Speed to Justice: State Circuit Court E-Filing System

THE SITUATION

Our client contacted us regarding a statewide e-filing system used by clerks and judges that seemed to work well in most counties, but was creating a great deal of user frustration in one of the busiest circuit courts in one county.

In short, our client needed to know how they might balance the e-filing needs of one mega-court with those of other small to medium-sized courts.

We did not have a Delivery Lead for this project. I thought that role would be essential to project success, so I volunteered to be both Delivery Lead and UX Researcher for this project.

MY ROLES:

• Organized weekly check-ins with the client to share work in progress, check on their delight levels, and ensure that we were exceeding their expectations

• Ran weekly agile retros with my team to identify what was going well, what wasn’t going well, and how we might improve our process for the following week

• Ensured project was on budget

• Submitted weekly client, team, and budget health updates to Delivery leadership team

• Outlined research agenda, and worked with the client to schedule that research

• Lead analysis of data, and development of a Figma website for client to access findings and recommendations

OUR APPROACH

The team used a combination approach that included:

• Contextual inquiry

• Interviews

• Secondary source research

We conducted contextual inquiry with file clerks, court clerks, judges, and judicial assistants. We also talked to clerk supervisors, IT staff, court Chief of Staff, and court Chief Deputy.

Due to union restrictions, were not permitted to take photos, audio, or video recordings of workers, nor could we do screen captures of their work: we relied solely on handwritten notes and sketches. It reminded me a great deal of some of the challenges I experienced during of my years of field research in Nigeria.

ANALYSIS

As we organized our notes we started making white board sketches that would become the journey maps and personas.

The Coronavirus lockdown occurred as we were deep into synthesizing our finding, and the team moved to entirely remote work. We collaborated in Figma, and left a Microsoft Teams line open between team members so we could discuss the project in real time. This worked remarkably well.

PERSONAS

Filing Clerks were our primary persona, as they experienced the highest number of pain points.

Judges were our secondary persona. Judges had a lower number of pain points, but their frustration levels were high because their work load in the state had increased. Budget cuts had led to cuts in court reporter positions, so judges had taken on extra responsibilities. When their e-filing system failed to perform, they ended up wasting valuable wasting. This, of course, impacted speed to justice.

JOURNEY MAP

Our journey map focused primarily on the file clerk persona, Skylar. Skylar experienced the highest number of pain points, and her work experience was entirely invisible to our client. The file clerks worked in a windowless room in a basement, completely out of sight.

Due to the pandemic, we would not be able to present to our client in person. We needed to effectively tell a powerful story of file clerk frustration, so we added the cartoon feature at the bottom with direct quotes from file clerks. For the cartoon figures I used Open Peeps, an amazing open source library by Pablo Stanley.

SELECTED FINDINGS AND RECOMMENDATIONS

• The e-filing tool our personas used was far more complex than necessary, with irrelevant features that visually crowded out essential features.

  • We recommended creating user-specific views that aggregated features relevant to that user’s workflow.

• While Judges and Judicial Assistants received formal training for the e-filing tool, clerks were expected to learn on the job.

  • We recommended formal training for all clerks as well.

• The e-filing software provider’s information architecture was out of date, which meant that once a week client IT had to send the software provider a full copy of the database, and then provide updates every 15 minutes. This created a strain on court bandwidth and increased chances of inaccuracies between two databases. This could have real-world consequences for citizens.

  • We recommended consolidating a single source of truth from which both software provider and client database pull.

• Clerks in particular had lost the sense of delight derived from being able to see their progress through work. They felt defeated because no matter how many files they worked through, the numbers for the “inbox” steadily increased.

  • Consider ways to visually indicate progress through work load for individual users.

We also offered our client a little “click math”:

WHAT I LEARNED

• I really enjoy government consulting, and the sense of working on something that will have a positive impact on public servants and the people they serve.

• It was interesting to go back to exclusively written notes in this project. I relied primarily on written notes during my field work in Nigeria, but have become accustomed to UX’s recording tools. Returning to paper reminded me that UX tools can sometimes make us lazy listeners.

• How to seamlessly transition my team to entirely remote collaboration.

• I hadn’t much spent time working in Figma and enjoyed learning that tool. It is a powerful, flexible remote collaboration platform.

• Never underestimate just how invisible certain work can be, and how powerful it can be to simply make that work starkly visible.

• Using Open Peeps is seriously fun.