Legal advice and support for domestic abuse: Simple, logical user journeys

Challenges

RCJ Advice needed a website to provide information and guidance that would supplement the CourtNav service. Their small team was receiving numerous enquiries from people in domestic abuse situations who would not go on to seek an injunction application, for example because:

• The abuse occurred in the past and the survivor was already safe, but needed legal help or advice with a related matter
• The situation was not eligible for an injunction and the survivor was advised against this action
• The survivor decided themselves not to proceed with an injunction for another reason.

Handling all these enquiries was putting a strain on the small team and affecting their ability to spend sufficient time supporting survivors with injunction applications, which is their main purpose. Although the team would signpost survivors to information that could help them, there was no single source they could go to for this information. The complex nature of these situations would often mean the team would have lengthy conversations with survivors and signpost them to a number of different places and services.

RCJ Advice wanted to pull all this advice and signposting into a single website. For some legal areas where RCJ have specific expertise (such as children, divorce and other family court proceedings), the website would need be able to give detailed advice and answer specific questions based on the survivor's unique circumstances. For other legal and advice areas, the website would be linking the survivor up to external websites and services where they would find the most appropriate help.

Crucially, the new website would need to break down complex information and processes in ways that would be understandable for survivors and for frontline advice staff without any legal knowledge. It would need to help users easily reach the answers they needed without having to digest other content that wasn't relevant for them.

Solution

User-centred content

Content was created in close consultation with RCJ subject matter experts for their technical knowledge, and translated into simple language a with friendly, conversational tone. Complex issues and processes are broken down in managable ways.

• Top level landing pages guide users by topic.
• Once in a topic, users are guided by scenario.
• The content page for each scenario is super specific, so users get directly to the answers they need without any fuss.

Content-first design

Our design and development teams worked collaboratively with the copywriter to create pages and components that make it as easy as possible for users to navigate the topics and scenarios.

• Clean, simple homepage and landing pages allow users to pick their topics without distraction.
• An index with anchor links at the top of every content page immediately shows the user what's on the page, and lets them jump straight to what's relevant for them.
• Soft shapes and warm colours have a reassuring feel, matching the tone of the content.
• Single, simple link tile style across landing and content pages doesn't give the user any more to process than they need to.
• Interactive triages sit seemlessly within pages, while having unique design elements that indicates to the user they are doing something slightly different, and enables them to navigate back and forth within the triage if they need to.

Interactive triage tools

Where issues are too complex to split out into single scenarios, for example child abduction or immigration, users are guided through a series of questions that leads them to the appropriate outcome.

These triage tools are a clever CMS feature, so SupportNav admins can easily edit them, and can create additional triages if they need to.