By Jason Wilson
Over the last year, I’ve spent a good deal of my free time thinking, journaling, and sketching about the future of legal research user interfaces and experience. The inspiration for this concentration seems to have started from many sources, including some of the following (in no particular order):
- Dabney, The Universe of Thinkable Thoughts: Literary Warrant & West’s Key Number System
- Custer, The Universe of Thinkable Thoughts Versus the Facts of Empirical Research
- Glimmer: How Design Can Transform Your Life, and Maybe Even the World
- Beautiful Data, The Stories Behind Elegant Data Solutions
- Few, Information Dashboard Design: The Effective Visual Communication of Data
- Stephen Fry’s myFry app (The Fry Chronicles)
- Jeff Jonas, When Federated Search Bites
- Patton, Making Sense of Complex Controls
- IDEO, The Future of the Book (video)
- Zite App for iOS
- Cairns, Metadata Everywhere
- Computational Legal Studies, Quantitative Legal Prediction
If I had to choose though, I would say that IDEO’s video made it clear to me that we aren’t doing enough to imagine a UI/UX future for legal research, or at least testing the boundaries a bit more. Many people I’ve talked to have expressed how much they really like the clean, simple interface of WestlawNext. But is that really a re-imagining of a legal research platform, or is it merely the point, in Seth Godin’s words, where profit meets scale? What about Fastcase? Arguably they’re thinking about better design, but are they achieving it? If we had unlimited resources, technology, and data access what would we create? To put it another way, if legal research had been central to the plot development of Minority Report (the film), what would it have looked like? That’s the kind of imagining I want legal researchers to do. Is it pie-in-the-sky kind of stuff? Absolutely. But that’s what makes it fun.
After all, the future is in our hands. Sort of.
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
Maybe adapt a technology like this? http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/02/ted-digita…?
I should have known you’d jump right to the sci-fi stuff. The article reminds me of the recent piece on Apple putting projectors into phones and implementing camera-related gesturing: http://www.patentlyapple.com/patently-apple/2011/….
It would be interesting to see if this technology is capable of being pushed out quickly and whether an entire generation of people could actually skip over touch-based computing and go directly to gestures.
I've already started to attempt a minority report type legal search and hope to have the concept video ready by the launch of iPhone 5.
I just came across your post while researching this subject and it inspired me.
Here are some my previous video's: http://www.youtube.com/legalcomplex.
In the trailer you'll see the announcement as the 5th icon (last icon on the right). The other 4 were a breeze compared to this challenge.
Maybe also of interest the (nested) mindmap which all my concepts are based on: http://www.mindmeister.com/1562709/legalcomplex-l…
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