Better contracts, Episode 4: let's get physical (the one with touch)

What you’ll get out of this episode

In this episode we’ll be looking at the power of touch and how you can use it to make contracts more engaging - and avoiding disengaging users. This episode is quite different from the first 3, as I’ll explain in the backstory. It's more “progressive” than the basics we’ve been looking at first, but as always I will connect it to the practical everyday.

The backstory

I was a speaker at last week’s Future of Contracts event (#FOC20) organised by Legal Creatives and Skye Contracts. I was blown away by the session by Amurabi on the first day (you can catch a replay here, day 1). Aside from the brilliant chemistry of the panel - they were having fun and brought us all along with them - one project caught my attention: a printed compliance manual with a piece of physical interaction integrated into it (I will show it later in this article). It struck a chord because of an earlier encounter on LinkedIn, where someone commented: why do we always think about software when we talk about technology? These two encounters were a reminder that innovation, technology and design, even when applied to law, does not necessarily have to be conventionally digital.

It made me think about the so-called Legal User Experience (LUX) and whether we are missing a trick here. Even in the digital realm, “touch” is relevant: the way users interact with tools and content, and how they engage with them. So much tech is about taking the effort away from users, but that can also lead to reduced engagement with the substance. An AI contract review solution can take away tedium, but what does it do to a user’s engagement with the content of the deal? Does an expert system built on a series of linear questions-and-answers increase or reduce the quality of the user’s experience with the subject matter? And then there’s friction, such an essential component of touch. I’ve seen people talking about the benefits of leaving (or creating) friction as a way of increasing positive engagement. Friction is an essential component of user engagement in gaming - and of critical importance to legal processes where user engagement is so critical.

So today’s episode is about exploring touch - in a number of forms - on your journey to better contracts.

Let’s get physical

Most of the time we think of legal design as something intangible: about designing content and processes - usually implemented digitally and therefore something you interact with through the medium of screen and mouse. Amurabi challenged this paradigm in designing a compliance manual, by including a printed booklet with a physical interaction: a red “filter” which a user would place over the top of text to read it fully. Here is an image of the booklet, and you can explore the online version here.

Pages from ICC Belgium compliance booklet, created by Amurabi.

As Marie says in her Medium article covering this topic: “The interaction that is created is the starting point for a dynamic between the user and the rules”. It’s a fascinating example of using design to increase engagement with content.

Keystrokes shortcuts, voice and haptic interactions are going to (re)gain relevance in tech as these are all ways of creating more tactile engagement now that we’re saturated with mouse clicks.

It does not need to be as fancy as this. Think about it for your next project. Will users print out your document? If so, how can you improve their interaction with the printed material? Printed pages create a need and a unique opportunity to design what users see first, how users navigate your document, and what they see last. Think about contextual aids on that front page (document maps, purpose statements), navigation aids throughout the document (remember that the user can’t CTRL+F) and the final thoughts you want to leave your user with. Think about the shape of your document - can you move away from portrait A4 and Word/PDF, to say something about your brand, communication strategy or the importance of the deal? Think bigger than page numbers and an index.

Let’s immerse

Airbus’ NDA for start-ups does not look like a contract. Neither does the entire process from start to signing, designed to be done through a mobile app through a series of interactive steps. It’s a reminder that a contract does not need to look like a traditional contract, nor does it need to work like one. Here, aside from the obvious visual differences, information about the contract process and onboarding is an integral part of the contract itself, leading to a more tactile experience of the process.

Airbus NDA for start-ups - prototype created with Astrid Kohlmeier.

So for your next project thing about: how can you increase (not reduce) the user’s touch points with your contract? Can you integrate interactive content like a document map or other navigation aids? Can you make it mobile, since finger-on-screen is a more direct form of interaction than moving a mouse around? Can you integrate the how (process) with the what (content) to give the user the full journey in the same document?

Let’s do friction

Nathan Kinch of >X talks passionately about designing in “valuable friction” to delay the user’s acceptance of online notices (terms and conditions or privacy notices) as a away of reducing “Agreement Bypass Bias” (the ‘learned’ behaviour users exhibit of bypassing agreements, and then sign or accept them with limited thought). We see extreme disengagement from content all the time: whether it’s consumers in Nathan’s example, or lawyers’ frustrations with getting business folk to read and understand legal content (contracts, compliance policies, legal guidance). Not surprising, since the content we’re asking them to engage with is usually long, dull, difficult and full of jargon. This phenomenon is hugely damaging because it erodes trust and leads to cognitive dissonance for the user.

Friction is also something that is essential to gaming, which is all about maximising user engagement. Rahul Votra of Superhuman (a paradigm-shifting email client that’s been making waves in productivity tech and which I personally absolutely love) talks about applying these techniques to create just the right level of involvement for users of his service - making it challenging enough to be really rewarding. See minute 12 in this video.

So how can you create positive friction to encourage users to engage with content? Making the content accessible and honest is of course the best strategy if in some ways the most difficult one. Beyond that, think about active consent (asking users to confirm they’ve read and understood), checklists (asking users to self-certify compliance), knowledge testing (but avoid gimmicky gameification), and exploration (letting the user actively explore the content - a nice segue into the next section).

Let users lead

The prevailing paradigm with legal tech and content (whether it’s contracts, matter management or expert systems) is sequential or rules-based workflow, where a pre-defined set of steps are “pushed” onto the user, for example the question-and-answer set that you usually see with drafting automation. These create limited engagement because the user has zero control over the process and it’s not always transparent. It’s hard to avoid because that’s how the tech is built (whether contract automation or no-code logic tools). However it’s not the only way. I designed this COVID19 Generator as an experiment in user-led exploration of content. It minimises the number of clicks to get to the output, yet encourage the user to play around with the sliders to explore and compare content in a more free-form way.

Screenshot from the Covid19 Adviser tool

So when designing your contracts think about how you can increase engagement by letting users lead. A conventional agreement is an invitation to read it in a linear way - dictated by the author. By adding an index, you’re inviting the user to explore the document by topic and jump to the bits that matter to the user. Replacing the index with a document map is even better, especially if you can enrich it with navigational aids like colour coding, subject zones or relevance hierarchy - now you’re giving the user additional information to help explore the document. Making your agreement modular gives the user added flexibility to decide which parts of the contract are a priority. This is not physical touch, but it is about increasing touch points, making your document more tactile and giving the user a sense of control.

To sum up

A key aspect of designing better contracts is processing fluency: how easy it is to understand something new. High processing efficacy (cognitive ease) encourages feelings of trust, comfort and pleasure. Low processing efficacy (increased cognitive load) leads to frustration and loss of interest. Some of the techniques described here are about processing fluency. But it takes more than processing fluency to create deeper engagement - which in turn is necessary for productivity and trust.

Try these techniques to engage users more deeply with contracts:

• physical touch with printed materials

• use different user interactions, beyond just reading and scrolling

• integrate the “what” with the “why” and the “how”, to turn dull legalese into a context-rich experience

• add useful friction, by requiring your user to interact with your content

• experiment with user-led exploration instead of rigid Q&A workflow

Hopefully the examples I’ve given are inspiring and real. Even since penning this article I’ve learnt and experienced some more dimensions to this which perhaps might need deep dive later. If you think you have a challenge that can’t be met with these examples and methods, get in touch!