New Mexico Legal Aid partnered with Theory and Principle to redesign the user experience of Law Help New Mexico. The site serves as a crucial resource, providing civic legal information for disadvantaged and low-income individuals throughout the state and they wanted to update the site to improve access to justice and provide New Mexicans with essential legal resources.
The updated Law Help New Mexico site promotes access to information. Legal topics and legal issues are prioritized on the landing page so that users can quickly find the information that they need. Each legal issue page includes FAQs and links to resources that can help them with that specific issue. The site also offers search functionality, with popular issue recommendations, and supports both English and Spanish languages.
Theory & Principle hosted workshops and sketch sessions with LHNM stakeholders to understand their preferences, goals, and experiences. We understood that the goal of this project was to create an easy to navigate and comprehensive directory of legal information for people who live in New Mexico, that supports content from multiple agencies. This project uses a headless WordPress framework to support a custom front-end, while allowing partner organizations to manage content in WordPress. With that in mind, we defined a site architecture and designed wireframes. We then conducted user interviews with those wireframes to get feedback on the updated workflows, content structure, and page layouts.
It was important to Law Help New Mexico that their new website concept is accessible, respectful, and informational. We created three style moodboard options that reflected those values and applied that style they chose to the wireframes to create hi-fidelity prototypes. As our development team converted the designs into a functional site, we worked with New Mexico Legal Aid and other contributing organizations on collecting and managing site content.
In January of 2023, the Law Help New Mexico site was launched and received overwhelming positive feedback.
