Justice Connect is a charity network of thousands of the nation’s best legal minds, coming together to help people and organisations find legal solutions to their everyday problems.

Holding themselves to the highest standards and driven by a desire to deliver real improvements in the lives of the people and communities they help. They collaborate with the right people and organisations - pro bono firms, healthcare services, homelessness groups and more, to get the right help to the right people at the right time.

Justice Connect sought to develop an application that would help streamline and prioritise matching the help seekers with appropriate services, or lawyers in their pro bono network.

However, they soon realised, for help-seekers the legal system is confusing and difficult to navigate – that people looking for free legal help regularly have a poor experience of finding and connecting with relevant services. Lawyers want to do more pro bono work, but that matching up unmet needs with relevant expertise is time consuming and labour intensive.

Justice Connect enlisted Pollen to help them co-design the end to end user experience for this very time poor audience - the lawyers.

The important first step of our journey together was a Discovery phase to immerse ourselves in the Justice Connect world. Understand the brand, any existing technology requirements, review any user feedback and conduct a review of the existing pages.

Features developed during the initial sketching phase included search and filtering, data visualisation, quick actions, navigation and short listing which would become main characteristics of the new portal.

We leveled up our paper sketches into a solution sketch for the Justice Connect team to begin to visualise our high level thinking and begin to gather feedback and input from the business.

As the Justice Connect portal is a function-driven platform containing sensitive content the visual direction needed to support the core critical functions of the portal and display the content in an appropriate and efficient manner. With the new brand understanding we aimed to breathe the vibrant and approachable Justice Connect brand via the introduction of core brand elements such as type and colour whilst maintaining high readability and accessibility.

Justice Connect is a growing organisation with hundreds more firms and cases being added to the platform during our project and then more recently an expansion to a global audience. This meant the design system had to be robust, flexible, future proofed and well documented to take the platform wherever it was headed and handle changes along the way.

Justice Connect’s development team were involved throughout all the project milestones to maintain ongoing alignment and to provide input for further informed design solutions.

With the portal successfully in the hands of users, Justice Connect and Pollen are set to consistently learn from the data and the users experience, iterating and improving to stay ahead and genuinely helping pro-bono lawyers in these very tumultuous times.