Shift Toward User-Centered Thinking in Legal Design

Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash

In my previous post, I outlined my initial understanding of legal design. Since then, I have moved from theoretical reading to methodological experimentation. The main theme of this stage has been the study of design thinking.

Design thinking, as presented in academic works on legal design, emphasizes empathy, problem definition, ideation, prototyping, and testing. In her book Law by Design, Margaret Hagan describes this process as iterative and user-centered, rather than linear and doctrine-based. For someone trained primarily in analytical thinking, this methodological shift was significant. Because it is more about a skill associated with the social or design field, but not with the legal field.

To apply these principles, I took a standard Erasmus contract and tried to look at it through the eyes of a student. Instead of immediately starting to edit the text, I decided to conduct a special empathy exercise — that is, to try to understand how someone without legal training would perceive it. I came up with an image of a hypothetical student and thought about the difficulties they might encounter at different stages: when they first read the agreement, when they sign it, when they organize their studies abroad, and when they complete the program. This exercise proved to be very useful for my learning. I noticed that my usual approach was to look at the contract from the point of view of compliance with rules and distribution of responsibility. But for a student, it is much more important that the contract is understandable, that they can predict what will happen, and that they feel confident in their actions. What is important to me as a “lawyer” does not always coincide with what is important to the user, in my case — the student.

Legal services should be evaluated not only in terms of their legal correctness, but also in terms of their user-friendliness. This is not so simple, as it requires a balance between precise legal correctness and language that is easily understood by ordinary people. One of the difficulties I encountered was understanding where true simplicity ends and oversimplification begins. In academic discussions on plain language, it is said that clarity should not kill important nuances. When I analyzed the contract, I noticed provisions that seemed unnecessarily complicated, but there were also those where legal precision was really important. Figuring out what can be simplified and what cannot requires a careful and balanced approach. Therefore, for people who have only heard superficially about legal design, it will be a little difficult when they realize that simply simplifying the language is not enough, and they will have to redo their work because legal accuracy and all the necessary details have been lost. I redrafted the contract, implementing important aspects of legal design, with a timeline, icons, etc. A brochure was also created to give students a better understanding of what the program entails. This visual work helped me see problems in the structure of the document that were not apparent when reading it normally. But more about this in the next blog post.

At this stage, I realized two important things. First, I am learning to evaluate contracts from the point of view of user-friendliness. Second, I noticed my professional habits: I am used to thinking that if a clause in a contract is legally correct, then it is also understandable. Legal design shows that this is not always the case, and my experience with reworking the document confirmed this. I also realized how important it is to work gradually, trying, checking, and improving my work at every step, rather than striving for the perfect result right away. Design thinking involves trying, testing, and improving, rather than immediately creating the perfect version. As a law student, I was used to submitting finished work, so this approach seemed unfamiliar and extremely difficult at first, because there are many details that you are unaware of at each stage. But this is precisely what helps to create a truly useful and understandable document.

In my next blog post, I will describe my first attempt to rewrite and restructure a legal document using plain language principles and visual organization. I intend to critically evaluate whether my changes maintain legal accuracy while improving usability. This will mark a transition from analysis to practical application. I mentioned this experience in this blog post, and I will describe it in detail in the third post.

At this stage, I began to view legal design not simply as a set of new skills, but as a way to rethink what constitutes a “good” legal solution. In my opinion, working with legal design requires more effort, but it helps to clarify what responsibility and quality mean when creating legal documents.