SIMS 213 Assignment 3

Project Scenarios , Competitive Analysis, and Preliminary Design

Task Scenario 1: Alex searches for multiple legal briefs

Wilma has asked Alex to search for all of the legal briefs filed in the XYZ case which has been appealed to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. The case involves a copyright dispute between company XYZ and company ABC. Alex knows the case name, the names of both parties, and the court. Alex goes to the BriefBank web site, enters the name of company XYZ into a search field on the home page.

BriefBank queries the application's database and returns a listing of legal briefs that meet the search criteria. Alex notices that four of the listed legal briefs concern the copyright case. He clicks the link to the first legal brief and scans the brief for completeness. He then repeats this process for the other legal briefs.

Having located legal briefs that satisfy his search criteria, Alex saves the PDF files into a directory that is accessible to Wilma and him and prints copies of the legal briefs. He then emails the the location of the directory containing the PDF files to Wilma.

Task Scenario 2: Wilma searches for a specific legal brief

Wilma is researching a specific issue for a legal brief. She knows that her good friend, Milton, has written a legal brief on a similar issue for a different case in the same jurisdiction. Wilma is familiar with that other case and most of Milton’s work. She knows that she can save a lot of time in research if she can get access to Milton’s legal brief. Luckily, Milton owes her some favors, so Wilma emails Milton with her request. Milton, a professor of law at Duke, is very busy and his secretary is on maternity leave. Therefore, he doesn’t want to try to locate and Fed Ex the document to Wilma. Instead, he directs her to BriefBank, where he has submitted the legal brief.

Wilma goes to the BriefBank web site and enters into a search field the name of one of the parties involved in the case for which Milton wrote his legal brief. BriefBank queries the application's database and returns a listing of legal briefs that meet the search criteria. For each listing, BriefBank provides the brief name, the case name, court name, the names of the parties, and a link to a PDF version of the legal brief.

Wilma knows the court of the desired legal brief. She also knows the legal brief was submitted as amicus curiae and expects these words to appear in the brief title. She sees that one of the listed legal briefs has the correct court and the correct title. Consequently, she clicks on the link to the PDF version and scans the legal brief to confirm that Milton is the author. Having located the desired legal brief, Wilma saves the PDF file and prints a copy of the legal brief.

Task Scenario 3: Wilma submits a legal brief

Wilma has written a legal brief and submitted to one of the parties’ legal counsel in an ongoing Supreme Court case. This is Wilma’s first legal brief submitted to a Supreme Court case. The counsel includes her legal brief with all of the other necessary materials submitted to the court. The court decides to take the case.

Wilma knows that this case is going to get a lot of press and wants to provide her legal brief to anyone that’s interested without having to do extra work. Consequently, she decides to submit the legal brief to BriefBank. Wilma goes to the BriefBank web site and clicks a link for submitting legal briefs. Before she starts the submission process, she scans the terms and conditions for submitting a legal brief. After reading the terms and conditions, Wilma decides to proceed with the submission.

She then reads the instructions for submitting a legal brief and discovers that she can submit her legal brief as a PDF file. Fortunately, a PDF file for the legal brief already exists. Next she provides the requested information regarding the author and the legal brief. Finally, she reviews the information she provided, confirms the right file is attached, and clicks the submit button. BriefBank notifies her that the legal brief has been submitted and provides an explanation of the Samuelson Clinic review process. A few weeks later, Wilma recieves an email from the Samuelson Clinic indicating that her legal brief has been accepted and is available on the BriefBank web site.

Rationale for not creating a task scenario for Grace

As BriefBank's webmaster, Grace's familiarity with interfaces for web applications is greater than our two legal researchers. Additionally, Grace's reasons for using BriefBank's interface will significantly different from those of Wilma and Alex. We believe that supporting the needs of the legal researchers will be the most challenging part of our development process, and focusing our attention on Grace will divert our efforts.

Consequently, we are not developing task scenarios for Grace. Grace will be very much a key persona as we consider workflow and database and ColdFusion development, but we believe that focusing on Alex and Wilma's scenarios will be the most crucial to successful development of BriefBank's interface.

Revisions to personas

During the development of the task scenarios for Wilma and Alex, we decided that these personas will be more representative if they are affiliated with a law school other than Boalt, because the actual client for BriefBank is at Boalt. Consequently, Wilma is now a professor at U.C. Hastings College of Law and Alex is a third year student at Hastings. These changes do not affact their task matrices. Following are the revised personas:

Wilma Donahue, frequent user of legal briefs for research

Wilma is a Law Professor at U.C. Hastings College of Law, where she teaches techlaw and runs a student clinic practicing public interest law. She has been a professor for six years, and prefers academic life to her early career practicing Intellectual Property law in Silicon Valley. She stays in constant motion between her office and lecture halls, collaborating with students and her staff of three. Her students know her for being tough but fair. Wilma does not tolerate her collaborators being late to meet her because one late appointment messes up her whole day.

Wilma is 41, and lives in a 1921 bungalow near campus with her architect husband, Michael, and their eight-year-old daughter, Caitlin. Wilma makes every effort to be home by 6 pm to relieve Heidi, the au pair. Wilma zips home in her Audi Allroad she chose for its adjustable ground clearance--higher for extra speed on her neighborhood's famous speed bumps. Wilma often arrives home starving, having forgotten to eat anything more than a green banana and caffe latte.

Wilma travels frequently and uses many different computers between locations. She has had a Lexis-Nexis account since starting law school in 1983. She is a whiz with office applications, particularly using Word for the stringent formatting required for submitting legal documents to courts. She uses Netscape 4.7 on all her computers because it is not a Microsoft product and she is most familiar with it. Wilma relies heavily on her Palm Pilot for her extensive contact information, but her Palm Pilot to will not sync with any of her computers.

Briefs are an everyday part of Wilma’s life. She applies high-level analysis techniques to her research. Given her familiarity with the law, individual cases, and the techlaw community, she can quickly assess the value of a brief by the writer’s name, the quality of the argument, and the quality of the writing.

Wilma belongs to an informal network of techlaw professionals. When she needs a brief, she can often contact the lawyers involved to get the information. She is obligated, then, to forward her own briefs to other researchers. Both requesting and distributing briefs takes valuable time, and Wilma cannot hand off these tasks to her overworked assistant.

Goals:

• Recognition. She is dedicated to her convictions, and would like her ideas recognized and put in practice in the legal system.
• Finding the right legal argument in a document. Wants to make sound legal arguments that sway appellate judges and therefore win cases and set precedents. Wants a robust collection of legal briefs available to her.
• Convenience. She already spends too much time on the phone and unopened Fedex packages of legal briefs stack up on her desk for days.

Alex Garcia, infrequent legal brief searcher

Alex is a third year law student at Hastings. Originally from Phoenix, Alex earned his undergraduate degree in economics from Arizona State University. At ASU, Alex was an active member of the campus’s chapter of College Republicans and interned for Senator John McCain during his senior year. Following graduation, Alex moved to Los Angeles and worked as a market analyst for a dot com until it ran out of funding.

During his studies at Hastings, Alex realized that the positions advocated by Wilma were consistent with his free market ideology. He has been involved with Wilma’s clinic for the last year. Alex admires Wilma and strives to impress her by producing quality work product in a timely fashion. Two of his clinic projects have required searching for legal briefs. These searches were somewhat frustrating because web services like Nexis-Lexis and WestLaw do not provide legal briefs. Consequently, Alex had to rely on his Internet search skills to find either briefs posted on the websites of the involved parties (or other interested parties) or at least the names of the attorneys for the involved parties. Furthermore, Alex realized that there are often issues with the completeness and/or authenticity of briefs found on web sites. Following such frustrating experiences, Alex heads to the gym and plays raquetball to let off some steam. Considering the self imposed pressure of excelling at the clinic and school, Alex plays a lot of raquetball.

Upon graduation from law school, Alex is going to clerk for a California circuit court judge. He expects this is the first step in his plan of becoming a judge.

Goals:

• Impress Wilma with the quality and timeliness of his work product.
• Minimize the frustration of searching the Internet for legal briefs, even though searching for legal briefs is an infrequent activity.
• When searching for legal briefs, locate briefs that are complete and can be authenticated.

Competitive Analysis

1. Competitive Analysis of Lexis-Nexis

http://web.lexis-nexis.com/universe

Lexis-Nexis is a for-profit fee-based online resource that is also available for free to academic users. It provides a wide variety of of news, business, legal, and reference information.

A search page for finding cases:

The simple search interface for finding cases allows searching by citation and party name. You can enter only one party and retrieve results. You can reverse the sequence of the party name without changing the results. These features make the interface very flexible for those who are searching without complete information.

Underneath every search form there is a help section called "Tips" where several kinds of help are provided. First, the "Tips" link in the upper left hand corner sends the user to the information at the bottom of this illustration. The "View Citation Formats" link displays a list of valid formats for entering a citation, and the "Source List" link points to a list of all the sources of the cases contained in the database, organized by state. If a user clicks on a particular state, the site displays attributes like time coverage, frequency of updates, and data format.

We like that the user can choose a particular kind of Help, at the time that he/she needs it most. The interface hides much of the complexity of the Help from those that don't need it.

A search results page:

The interface gives feedback in the form of Search Terms at the top of the page. The highlighted links give a clear indication of what to do to access the particular document. The subheading shows how many documents were retrieved. To narrow a search, a user can enter additional terms in the Focus textbox at the bottom of the page.

The four tabs at the top of the screen disclose progressively larger groups of information about each retrieved case. The Document List discloses basic date and decision information, while the Full view contains information about the entire case. These different views give users a choice of how much information to absorb, depending on their purposes. This is going to be an interesting problem for our interface-- how do we satisfy both Alex and Wilma without overwhelming them with information?

Documents on the site were all in html format. Clicking on a "Display Document" button displays a print-optimized version of the content, which you can save through the browser. The interface doesn't offer a running list of documents viewed, or a way to save the documents within the interface.

The interface has a standard error page, with a link to return to the search page and a list of suggestions for revising the search. The biggest problem with this screen is the suggestion at the bottom which refers a user to a library staff member for help, instead of linking directly to more detailed help.

2. Competitive Analysis of Electronic Frontier Foundation

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is non-profit, donor-supported organization dedicated to providing information and education about civil liberty issues related to technology, as well as working actively to protect such fundamental rights. Their target audience includes the general public as well as the press and policymakers. The legal information found on their website consequently focuses on cases relating to these issues.

EFF home page:

Home page features:

• a header containing a search component and a separate component that allows the user to select a particular topic or section of the web site is located across the top of the page.
• a navigational section containing a list of web site sections is located along the left side of the page.
• a content section containing a listing of alerts is placed in the main section underneath the header.
• a content section containing a listing of featured news is placed underneath the alerts section.
• a content section containing a listing of events is placed underneath the featured news section.
• a content section containing a listing of focus topics is placed underneath the events section.

A case-specific archive page:

One of the links is for Active Legal cases. When this link is clicked, the user is provided a listing of current cases grouped by subject (DMCA, Consumer Privacy). Clicking on a case link, produces a listing of case related documents including legal briefs, other legal documents, press releases, and opinion essays. Clicking on a subject link produces a listing of files, cases (which can be clicked), and links to off-site resources.

It appears that the best way of locating documents concerning a particular case is to click the link for Active Legal Cases and then select a case or subject of interest. However, sometimes the result of clicking a case is a simple listing of documents. Othertimes, the result is web page where documents are grouped.

When a listing of documents is provided, often the link to the document is simply the name of the document file (ie 20020114_ny_eff_prr.html), but there is a brief description of each document. Both pdf and html formats are used.

While providing a wealth of information, this site has a very inconsistent look-and-feel as well as organizational layout. The navigational sidebars do not appear on all pages of the site and even when it does, the text size and style sometimes differ. There does not seem to be a well-thought out plan for archiving older information and one can easily get lost going deeper and deeper into the site. In addition the search function is very underdeveloped with no description of it or how it works, in fact, the search link on the home page is broken. When you enter search terms and click the search button, the layout and color scheme changes, there isn't a back button, and there isn't any text indicating that the user is still in the EFF web site. The search results also do not appear to be limited to EFF web pages or documents.

3. Competitive Analysis of FindLaw's Supreme Court Center

FindLaw.com is a large, general collection of online legal resources. FindLaw's Supreme Court Center essentially mirrors official content from the Supreme Court, but the Center is a small percentage of the entire FindLaw, which we will not analyze. For example, FindLaw's home page (http://www.findlaw.com/) has no indication briefs are contained within the site.

FindLaw's Supreme Court Center is a well-known resource in its own right. The Supreme Court Center has implemented search in a variety of ways that support the branding and and also enabled tabs as a means of browsing content. This includes navigation tabs organized by main types of documents to be found relating to the Supreme Court, a reasonable expectation of the items to be found even before a search begins.

Supreme Court Center's navigation tabs:

These navigation tabs give a reasonable expectation of the types of documents available. A notable usability problem, however, is that these tabs do not change state to indicate the current category.

FindLaw's Supreme Court Briefs are a definitive collection referred to by leading competitors in Supreme Court documents.

Once inside the collection of briefs interface is presented categorized by the years of the case with the most current cases appearing on the same page.

Competitive Comparison of Interface

The Collection of Supreme Court briefs is too narrow, as many important techlaw cases are decided definitively before reaching the Supreme Court. There are many flaws in visual navigation elements, shown in blue above. Many difficulties in navigation also arise from vast and unrelated elements of the larger FindLaw system. Thus, FindLaw's navigation is at once too simple and too complex for deep research in the field of techlaw legal briefs.

The organization schema of FindLaw's Supreme Court briefs is really quite simple, and seems to apply for a collection of briefs for the one court that is the focus of the Supreme Court Center. The briefs section is essentially three long pages hierarchically organized by

• Year (three "terms" of the Court, an annual cycle starting in October)
• Within each year is a confusing mixture of alphabetical organization and month in which documents were filed (e.g. "Docket for April 2001")
• Within each month is a daily chronology (e.g. dates within April 2001)

4. Competitive Analysis of Legal Information Institute's Supreme Court Collection

The LII Supreme Court Collection is part of the LII or Legal Information Institute website that is a non-profit group associated with the Cornell Law School. Their mission is, as stated on their website:

1. To carry out applied research on the use of digital information technology in the distribution of legal information, the delivery of legal education, and the practice of law.
2. To make law more accessible not only to U.S. legal professionals but to students, teachers, and the general public in the U.S. and abroad.

They subsequently offer an extensive collection of primary legal information and commentary online including Constitutions, codes, court opinions, and relevant links organized both topically and by type.

LII Supreme Court Collection home page:

The variety of legal information offered by this website is far greater than the scope or intent of Briefbank. In fact, on the main page of the Supreme Court Collection is a link directing users who are interested in briefs specifically to another site, FindLaw.com:

In terms of organization, resources can be found through several ways including case name, author name, docket numbers. Simple forms are provided when searching by such specific metadata fields. Resources can also be browsed topically. There is a general keyword search field that allows simple boolean operators and narrowing of searching by chronology. When viewing resources by faceted classification (by author, by topic, by party, etc) the site provides complete alphabetical listings of every document.

Overall this site would probably rate as not very competitive to Briefbank. Briefbank fills a much smaller niche and serves a more specialized user group. In fact, the LII website is known as being a comprehensive guide to legal information through links to other resources as well as providing primary information themselves. Briefbank could best work with this site by becoming known and link to as a specialized source for briefs, as FindLaw currently is.In addition, as mentioned in the mission statement above, their target audience includes members of the general public as well as legal professionals and researchers which encompasses are far greater user range of legal knowledge and experience than BriefBank proposes to cater to.

Competitive Analysis Summary

Good Features to Utilize:

• user feedback when searching
• easily accessible and useful help
• advanced features hidden yet easily accessible
• consistent use of page layout and colors
• options for sorting search results
• options for viewing search resulgs
• good use of tabs
• facted classification, alphabetical classification
  

Bad Features to Avoid:

• inconsistent page layout
• broken links
• lack of navigational cues
• overly "deep" website organization
• poor use of screen real estate (giant headers, important content at bottom)
• confusing links that are poorly described
  

Initial design ideas

Conceptual Overview