As Clicklaw Manager Drew Jackson is currently taking a leave, we are fortunate to have Brenda Rose stepping in as Clicklaw Project Coordinator beginning October 6th. Brenda has worked for many years in the Legal Services Society’s Community and Publishing Services, and has been contributing to Clicklaw as a member of the editorial review committee.

In the meantime, if you have any questions about Clicklaw you can contact Johanne Blenkin, Executive Director of Courthouse Libraries BC, or Janet Freeman, Clicklaw Co-editor at editor@clicklaw.bc.ca 

We’re pleased to be launching Clicklaw during Law Week 2009. The Clicklaw site will be publicly available on April 20 at www.clicklaw.bc.ca. Organized by the Canadian Bar Association, Law Week is a national event held annually in April celebrating the signing of Canada’s Charter of Rights & Freedoms. On April 25, the Clicklaw team will be at the Law Day open house in Vancouver at the Vancouver Public Library from 10:00 to 2:00 (come visit our table!). 

Many, many thanks to the 24 organizations formally participating in Clicklaw, who have been adding resources to the site over the last few weeks in preparation for the initial launch. The site will continue to evolve over the months ahead, with additional resources and more features (including a Google Maps-powered map of legal services in the province, coming by October).

Over the last two months we’ve had a chance to hear feedback on the Clicklaw wireframe prototype and to test out how well the wireframe held up with real content added. We’ve folded the insights gained into a final version of the wireframe: the Clicklaw wireframe prototype 2.0.

Among the changes in the wireframe prototype 2.0 that we’re really excited about:

• client-centred section names: the names of the four main sections now reflect what Clicklaw users will come to the site to do: Solve Problems, Learn & Teach, Reform & Research, (find help on the) HelpMap
• client-centred groupings of topics: in the Solve Problems & HelpMap sections, topics are grouped by client-centred labels: Your family, Your money, Your safety, Your daily life, etc.
• taxonomy scaled back: the taxonomy has been scaled back to fewer legal issues, allowing the most common & most disruptive legal problems to stand out more
• tags, a new feature: new are tags added (optionally) by contributor organizations, providing specific pathways to information and reflecting the diversity of our PLEI community

A slideshow tour of wireframe prototype 2.0 is embedded below and available to view or download on SlideShare.  The tour of the wireframe prototype 2.0 is also in PDF format (980KB).

We now shift into the coding stage of the development, targeting April 2009 for launch of Clicklaw.  

We’re excited to be sharing a tour of the wireframe prototype of the Clicklaw site. A wireframe prototype is a barebones version of key areas of the site, with no visual design applied, but clickable in a way that simulates the experience of using a website. This summer we conducted usability testing of an early version of the wireframe prototype, and the version shared here has been revised based on the results of the usability testing. The Clicklaw Project Update slideshow embedded below and also posted on SlideShare includes:

• a project recap: who, why, what, how
• a tour of the Clicklaw wireframe prototype
• usability testing the wireframe prototype: how we did it, what we learned

[Update in April 2009: Clicklaw is now available in beta at www.clicklaw.bc.ca. Try it out, give us feedback!]

In Clicklaw Project in a Nutshell (updated in March 2009) (PDF, 86KB), we describe in two pages:

• what problem Clicklaw is trying to solve
• how Clicklaw will help people solve legal problems and find legal help (among other things)
• the selection criteria for content that will be included on Clicklaw
• other frequently asked questions about the project (such as: Q. When will the site be available; A. In April 2009, and extended throughout 2009 with additional content and features)

I’m pleased to report that the portal site we are developing has a name: Clicklaw.  The project steering committee and project team worked through a really interesting naming process, led by one of our consulting partners, Karo Design. After learning about name types, such as descriptive as compared to evocative or experiential names (who knew?), we and Karo brainstormed candidate names. Karo then led us through an evaluation exercise, where we rated each name on nine criteria, such as distinctiveness, depth, and energy. That generated a shortlist, from which Clicklaw emerged as the consensus winner for our project steering committee. 

This week features a PLEI Portal update event for organizations formally participating in the project. The update will include:

• A demo of a clickable prototype of the Portal website
• The results of usability testing that we conducted over the summer of the clickable prototype
• The latest version of the PLEI taxonomy (the classification scheme designed to help users find things on the Portal) 
• An update for participating organizations about integrating with the Portal
• The name we have chosen for the site

Look for blog postings following on these topics over the weeks ahead. For this update event, we are delighted to be part of National Pro Bono Week and the buildup to the 2nd National Pro Bono Conference. Many thanks to Pro Bono Law of BC for providing space for this event in the SFU Harbour Centre.

We are excited to share a set of six PLEI Portal personas. As mentioned in previous postings, the personas are a way to make real the users that we’re designing the PLEI Portal for. The personas can be seen here via an embedded slideshow, or by viewing them on full screen on SlideShare, where you can also download the slideshow:

| View | Upload your own

Over the last two weeks, our project team has been developing a set of user personas for the PLEI Portal project, building on a workshop held on April 24. As mentioned in a previous posting, user personas are a technique to make real the various user groups who will be using the Portal, a way to put the user at the centre of our design process:

“A persona is a user archetype you can use to help guide decisions about product features, navigation, interactions, and even visual design. By designing for the archetype – whose goals and behaviour patterns are well understood – you can satisfy the broader group of people represented by that archetype.”
- Kim Goodwin, Cooper

We are developing our personas from audience research that included interviews with several organizations participating in the Portal initiative, surveys on LawLINK and the Electronic Law Library, and analysis of website traffic on those sites and the sites of several participating organizations. From that research, we looked at patterns in users across several dimensions, some demographic and some based on behaviour and need:

• age, gender, ethnicity, education, income, language, location
• technical experience/skills
• experience with legal system
• need for assistance
• frequency of and reason for use

These patterns are informing our personas, which will each be captured in a 1 page description that includes a name, photo, goals, needs, behaviour patterns, and some fictional details to add personality. For each persona we are developing scenarios involving a legal circumstance that could bring that persona to use the Portal site. These personas and scenarios will then be used to guide decisions about the design of the Portal.

Facilitated by Kirsten Hall of OpenRoad Communications, our persona workshop on April 24 featured a really interesting breakthrough. We collectively shifted from thinking of our personas as representing client groups that many of our organizations work with (seniors, the aboriginal community, persons with disabilities, and so on) to thinking of our personas in terms of the approach they would potentially take to using the Portal site…

• Info seekers
• Independent problem solvers
• Help seekers
• Learners

…and in terms of their role in working with people seeking to use and learn about the law:

• Helpers (advocates and intermediaries)
• Educators

We’re currently fleshing out these personas, and will be posting them to the blog shortly.

We recently held the first of two planning and discovery workshops on the PLEI Portal project. Participating in the workshop were several of the organizations participating in the Portal initiative, the project team, and the project steering committee.

Facilitated by Anson Lee of Karo Design, the workshop included a review of interesting technologies and approaches we may want to consider in developing the Portal — stay tuned for upcoming posts on faceted searching and a new feature on the Alaska Airlines site called Ask Jenn.

Group activity 1: Postcards announcing a mock-launch

The workshop also featured an activity in which three small groups created postcards announcing the Portal site on its launch. There was some great creativity on display, with postcards announcing the mock-launch to three different audiences — one to the public, a second to educators and intermediaries (those such as advocates, librarians, and community workers who help the public navigate the legal system), and a third to the PLEI Network of participating organizations:

For the public

For intermediaries & educators

For the PLEI Network

Themes shared by all three postcards announcing the mock-launch included:

• the idea of one stop access
• reliable, trustworthy source
• the site being helpful as a tool, a tangible resource
• British Columbia-focused
• simplicity: keep to a simple, clear message
• timeliness: updated, current, fresh
• the idea that the site helps people find, not just search
• people finding legal help in addition to legal information and education

Group activity 2: User personas

The workshop also featured a second group activity that involved a trial run at developing user personas. User personas are a technique to make real the different types of user groups who will be using the Portal, a way to put ourselves in the user’s shoes. The idea is to create a composite picture of a type of user, and to make that picture come to life with a name, photo, specific characteristics, attitudes, mindset, and so on. For each persona we will develop one or more scenarios involving a legal circumstance that could bring that persona to use the Portal site. These personas and scenarios will then be used to guide decisions about the design of the Portal.

Working in small groups, there were three very credible personas developed, each with a scenario of a legal problem that would lead them to use the Portal site. For example, one group created the persona of Doris, a 28-year-old nanny, new to British Columbia from the Philippines:

Doris’ scenario was that she had been asked by her employer to do more than the parties had originally agreed, and that when she expressed concern she was falsely accused of stealing jewellery from the family, who docked her pay. Doris was now in distress, fearing that her status in Canada would be jeopardized if she sought out help. Playing out the scenario, the group who developed the Doris persona had her learning of the Portal site through a poster on a bus, and with the help of a translator Doris was able to use the Portal to locate a service that provided her with a pro bono lawyer. Doris learned what her legal rights were, and the lawyer was able to support Doris in resolving her dispute with the family. 

The Doris persona was one created to get familiar with the concept of developing personas. The next stage for our project is to identify 8-10 personas who represent key user groups for the Portal site. The challenge will be to distill the possibilities down to 8 or thereabouts, and to prioritize within even that number who are the primary personas that we have in mind as we develop the Portal. 

To support this persona development, we’re collecting information currently available about user groups from across our PLEI Network of organizations. At a second planning and discovery workshop on Thursday, April 24, we’ll be using that consolidated information about user groups and developing a set of personas. It should be interesting!