Law & Design Colab

I joined the L&D Colab at the very beginning, as part of the design team. We’ve worked on a number of projects throughout these 4 years, and here you can check out a sample of our designs.

 Ontario Lease Wizard

Ontario’s Standard Form Lease agreement was supposed to make life easier for landlords and tenants. But the paper-based, fillable PDF is hard to understand and use – as a result, it’s often never even read by the parties.

Our solution: a web application that helps people complete and sign the Standard Form Lease while educating users about their legal rights and connecting them with valuable community supports. Using a participatory design process that engaged many experts and community stakeholders, we developed a high-fidelity prototype and conducted usability testing.

After conducting research with both target audience and people in the Ontario housing field, we started developing a desktop app that allowed for an easy and intuitive interaction in the fill-in process, both for landlords and tenants.

We reorganized the different sections of the original pdf and create custom UX for each of them, using for example data pickers, imagery, toggles, document uploading modals: all basic elements that don’t require high levels of tech-savviness.

The result is a clean, legible, plain-language app, that could improve the housing market in making the players more informed and empowered and so the landlord/tenant relationship more balanced.

  • You

  • Your priorities

  • The unit

  • Lease basics

  • Details

 

Unlock Bail Reform

Ontario’s bail system is fundamentally not doing the job it was designed to do. “Bail” is a court order that allows people who are accused of a crime to live in their community - instead of being imprisoned in jail - while their criminal charges get resolved.

The bail system is supposed to be quick, efficient, and minimally restrictive on the freedom of legally innocent people. Instead, our bail system:

  • suffers from extreme delays and inefficiency;

  • denies dignity and basic legal rights to legally innocent people;

  • erodes our foundational legal principles;

  • imprisons 300% more people than it did 30 years ago despite falling crime rates.

For years, the legal community struggled to create meaningful change despite broad agreement around the reforms that were needed. Our mission is to build sustained public attention, understanding, and pressure for system-wide reform. We do this by using creative media to give expert knowledge the cultural influence it deserves.

We spent 1 year doing research, developing content that is easy to understand to a non-legal audience and, finally, designing a mobile-first website allowing the users to browse all the material quickly and easily, without compromising on details.

The result is this card-based system map (our core function), that progressively discloses information more in detail, with an intuitive L-R swipe interaction and expand/collapse modals.

Launches Oct. 29th!

  • Landing page

  • System Map "What Is"cards

  • System Map - Expanded Card 1

  • System Map "What Couls Be" Cards

  • System Map - Expanded Card 2

  • Root Causes

  • Resources