Ideation Workshops in Alaska & Hawaii

In January, two-day Ideation Workshops were held in Alaska and Hawaii, drawing on Microsoft’s Inclusive Design methodology. The goal of the workshops was to engage local community members and project stakeholders in generating ideas and insights about the real-life experience of people seeking legal help to inform the user experience design of the Legal Access Platform.

“The Inclusive Design principle is a broad-spectrum idea meant to produce products that are inherently accessible to all, people with disabilities and people without.  Microsoft believes strongly that this human-centric design results in products that benefit people universally. As such, it has been mandated as a key tenant for all product development across the company.” Carly Ichiki, Lead Project Manager for the Initiative, Microsoft

The Ideation workshops incorporated findings from user immersion studies conducted in the fall 2017 in Alaska and Hawaii. Using a toolkit developed by Microsoft, local community engagement firms in each state conducted surveys and interviews of individuals who had experienced legal needs themselves or knew people who had. The user immersion studies helped us gain a more personalized understanding of the problem space, the people we are trying to help, and the challenges they face in learning about and navigating the legal system.

Participants in the Ideation Workshops included local community members who had either experienced legal needs themselves, or who are frequently sought out as “navigators” for others in their community seeking legal help. Additional participants included members of the national project team, and representatives from the Alaska Court System and Justice for All project, Alaska Legal Services Corporation, United Way / 211, the Alaska public library system and the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium, among other groups. Organizational participants in Hawaii included the Legal Aid Society of Hawaii, Family Court on Oahu and Aloha United Way / 211.

The first day of each workshop drew on personal stories shared by these individuals to prioritize key user needs and wants in the Legal Access Platform. During the second day, designers from Fell Swoop, a user experience design firm, assisted small groups in storyboarding examples of how people might access the Platform and engage with resources available on it to find solutions to their legal problems.

The Microsoft and Fell Swoop teams now have the exciting – and daunting! – task of synthesizing the rich and varied feedback from these workshops into a design brief, and ultimately, prototype designs that will be user-tested in Anchorage and Honolulu in the next month.