The Justice is in the Details: Evaluating Different Self-Help Designs for Legal Capability in Traffic Court

How effective is a legal system that people cannot understand how to navigate? As more people try to navigate the civil justice system as self-represented litigants, there is more awareness about the importance of self-help tools that can build legal capability. If there is more effective self-help, then this can improve the quality of justice, both procedural and substantive, that people experience in the legal system. Yet there is little study of how and whether self-help can be effective in building legal capability, and which kinds of visuals, digital tools, or interactions are most effective at engaging people and helping them navigate the legal system. This paper builds off the nascent literature on how design can improve people’s navigation of complex bureaucratic systems, to conduct an exploratory design research into effective self-help for traffic court. It documents the participatory design process, lightweight exploratory evaluation method, and the findings on which type of self-help has the most promise for this area of court. It finds that visual design patterns have value, but that digital tools are needed to get user engagement and impact on outcomes

Reading Nutrition Labels: A Predictor of Health and Wealth?

This study explored relationships between the practice of reading Nutrition Facts labels on food products and the frequency of performance of 19 positive health and financial practices. Data were collected using an online survey with 3,361 observations that provided a simultaneous assessment of the participating individuals’ health and financial practices. Few publicly-available instruments of this type exist. The reliability of the overall scale used in this study was .845. Support was found for three hypotheses: there are differences in demographic characteristics between those who read Nutrition Facts labels and others and respondents who reported reading nutrition labels had both higher health practice scores and higher financial practice scores than others. Those who were more likely to read nutrition labels were females, older respondents, and those with higher education and incomes. Findings of this study, which provide evidence of positive associations between two different aspects of people’s lives, imply that it might be useful for both health and financial practitioners to know if their clients/students read nutrition labels on a regular basis. Having this information can inform the content and duration of interventions to change health- and financial-related behaviors