Making the case for human-centered design: A Department of Justice case study

Millions of people interact with services provided, funded, or overseen by the U.S. Department of Justice every day. In turn, thousands of Justice Department staff work to improve those experiences.

To support and amplify this work, the Office for Access to Justice launched Access DOJ in June 2024. This is a department-wide initiative using human-centered design to make services more accessible, effective, and efficient for the diverse communities the Justice Department serves.

Behind our high-profile launch event was over two years of behind-the-scenes work. While we leaned on our own expertise and guides like the Human-centered design guide series on Digital.gov and Customer experience cookbook (PDF, 1,114 KB, 33 pages) from the Department of Veterans Affairs, there were many things we could only learn from doing.

Nine lessons on human-centered design at the Justice Department

Here are nine lessons we learned along the way.

Lesson 1. Find your home

Access DOJ found a natural home in the Office for Access to Justice, a standalone agency within the department that works to ensure access to the promises and protections of our civil and criminal legal systems for all communities. The office’s principles of accessibility, innovation, and integrity are well-aligned with a design initiative aimed at closing justice gaps. Office leadership supported our vision from the beginning and continue to serve as invaluable thought partners and champions for the work.

Lesson 2. Find your people

Along the way, our team connected with many Justice Department colleagues hoping to improve their services through user research. Some were already using design and other innovative methods, and all were hungry for connections and support. Every time we met someone new, we asked them a simple question: “Who else should we talk to?” These connections became our cheerleaders and early adopters. For example, two of the staff members behind the Civil Rights Reporting Portal redesign later joined us as close advisors to guide and shape Access DOJ.

Lesson 3. Don’t try to do everything at once

Spreading human-centered design methods and mindsets is a marathon, not a sprint. We started with two methods: plain language and usability testing. These principles are easy for people to understand, have clear and tangible benefits, and are accessible to newcomers. Both methods also had organizational traction: the Justice Department has a plain language working group and the Civil Rights Division conducted usability testing with 18F to improve ADA.gov and build the Civil Rights Reporting Portal. With this approach, we are focused on socializing plain language and usability testing throughout the department, removing barriers to adoption, developing resources, and facilitating training. As the initiative grows, we plan to add more methods to our offerings.

Lesson 4. Show, don’t tell

As soon as possible, do the work. We invested early in two demonstration projects that we can point to when we need examples of what customer experience looks like in the Justice Department . In one project, we worked with the Office of the Pardon Attorney to redesign and simplify the application for a presidential pardon. This collaboration showed how design can reduce burden for both the public and staff. It also modeled our chosen methods of usability testing and plain language. Finally, the demonstration projects gave us a chance to refine our approach before going live with the Access DOJ initiative.

Lesson 5. Bring in reinforcements

We started our customer experience work at the Justice Department as a team of two people: one a full-time employee and the other through the Presidential Innovation Fellows program. We needed a quick and easy way to get more resources and support. We ended up partnering with a team of designers and strategists at the Lab at OPM. The Lab provided support as we shaped the overall strategy and design of the initiative, facilitated our demonstration projects, and crafted our external messaging. Later, we were able to recruit a senior customer experience strategist to our team to increase our capacity.

Lesson 6. Lean into what makes you unique

We call our unique approach “Designing for Access to Justice.” It brings an access to justice lens to traditional human-centered design. Here are some examples of our approach in practice:

• Start each project by analyzing the justice gaps that exist by asking what barriers exist to equal justice under law, and for whom?
• Look to the state and local levels for inspiration. ** What innovation is happening in state courts? What are local jurisdictions doing to increase access?
• Engage legal aid providers to surface common challenges faced by people without lawyers.
• Review existing access to justice and legal design research.
• Bring in subject matter experts from criminal and civil policy teams.

In the second U.S. Trustee Program project, we worked with legal aid providers who regularly assist low-income communities with the bankruptcy process. This includes people without access to reliable phone service, internet, or computers. Their perspectives were critical to understanding experiences with virtual bankruptcy meetings and opportunities to increase access, especially for people without legal representation.

Lesson 7. Center impact

The purpose of customer experience efforts is to improve the public’s interactions with government services. We built evaluation into our process to ensure that we consistently move toward making Justice Department services more accessible, efficient, and effective for the people we serve. This includes analyzing readability statistics to ensure our content is accessible and using the holistic burden assessment process developed by the team focused on the public’s experience when recovering from a disaster.

Lesson 8. Connect to existing priorities

We looked for opportunities to incorporate human-centered design methods and mindsets into the Office for Access to Justice’s existing priorities. For example, we proposed people-centered simplification as the focus of the 2022 Legal Aid Interagency Roundtable Report (PDF, 1,790 KB, 61 pages). This introduced the concept of administrative burden and showed how human-centered design could increase access to justice through simplified forms, processes, and language.

Lesson 9. Ask for help

There are many generous and talented people who are eager to help improve federal government services and outcomes. We received help from leaders with the Department of Homeland Security, General Services Administration, VA, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Department of Agriculture, U.S. Digital Service, and many other groups. We worked with colleagues from the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs and the customer experience team in the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) on the roundtable report and subsequent efforts. Other Presidential Innovation Fellows also provided invaluable connections and insights.

Special thanks to the rest of the Access DOJ team (Jay DuBois and Jenny Nelson), Office for Access to Justice staff and leadership, the Lab at OPM, our project partners at the Justice Department, and everyone who has connected with us along the way.