A few weeks ago I went to a hearing in municipal court.  I was only there to observe.  I’d never seen one in person before.

And it was riveting.

As a law student, watching that hearing was like being a kid in a candy shop.  I was able to see all these things I had only read about in caselaw and textbooks.  It was about 8 hours long, but to me those hours just flew by.

But something else occurred to me during that hearing.  This is a horrible user experience.

What does that mean?  User experience (usually abbreviated to UX) is a term used in the tech community to describe the interaction between a user and some type of software, usually a website.  Is it easy to understand?  Is it Intuitive? Can a user easily find what they were looking for?

Obviously it’s a little weird to apply a tech term to a real-life experience like a courtroom.  It hadn’t occurred to me that you could apply it to real-life experiences until Jason Clauβ at UX Planet applied it to the architecture in a Seattle Link Light Rail station.  The architecture in question is a literal hole in the roof.  It’s clearly supposed to be some sort of sky-light, just without the usual glass or hard-plastic.  A literal hole.  Jason Clauβ goes on to point out the biggest problem here: This is in Seattle, where they get an average of 40 inches of rain every year, spread out across 150 days a year.  Already soaked from your trip to the transit station?  Here’s some more water on your head, and wet floors.

So how does this apply to municipal court?  Like I mentioned before, a hearing in a municipal court is a wonderland for a law student. And that’s what courtrooms cater to: the attorneys, the law-students, and the paralegals. The courtroom orders itself toward those who already know what’s going on.  There was a six-member jury at the hearing, and all I saw on their faces was confusion. Terms that I definitely didn’t know two years ago were being thrown around with abandon.  The jury instructions would be a huge hurdle for someone unfamiliar with the vocabulary.

Even the hearing process itself would be foreign.  Sure, everyone knows the basics.  But beyond that, how much does the average person understand? Most understanding of court procedure will come from sensationalized, drama-filled sources like Law & Order, meaning that average person might have a completely wrong idea of how the court system works.

So to bring back that idea of the user experience, how easy is the courtroom experience to understand?  How intuitive is it?  Can a user easily find what they were looking for?  The answer is obviously “no” to each of these questions.  And that is problematic.  Like a user is to a website, the average person is the heart and soul of the courtroom.  Not the attorneys.  Not the judge.  The people who come in as Petitioners, as Respondents, and as Jury Members are what the courts are built for. They’re the ones that want justice.  And if they can’t understand what’s going on, then what’s the point?  It’s very similar to having a hole in your roof that you call a “skylight”.  It’s fancy and formal, but it totally misses the point of having a roof.