Human Centered Design to Improve Civil Court Form Accessibility in Michigan: A FormFest 2025 Profile

If you’re in court, you’re probably not having a great day—and that’s before you start on the paperwork. Court forms are notoriously difficult to navigate, filled with legalese, complicated sentence structures, and references to court rules and intricate procedures.  While there are various efforts underway to improve court accessibility, most attention has focused on criminal, rather than civil court reform. From a user experience perspective, addressing issues of accessibility in civil court is just as critical, according to Legal Design Strategist, Rachael Zuppke, and Design Researcher, Molly Graham.

“In criminal court cases, where defendants have the right to counsel, lawyers act as  informational navigators. The learning burden is reduced,” Zuppke said. “In civil court, where cases include eviction, family law, guardianship—people may be at risk of losing their housing, their children, or their autonomy—but there is no guarantee of representation and people are frequently representing themselves. In that environment, accessibility is crucial.”

Zuppke and Graham are working to improve that access for litigants in Michigan, using a human-centered design process that reimagines court forms by considering each change from the viewpoint of users. It’s a holistic approach that examines everything from language to layouts, in pursuit of empowering people “to represent themselves to the best of their ability,” Graham said.

“The co-design process isn’t just done with the user in mind—it’s with the user,” she said. “We sit down with them and ask, ‘How can we make this form better? Does this work for you? What would you want to see here?’ They actually have a hand in crafting the end product.

Molly Graham: So Many Thoughts About Forms

It’s hard to pinpoint exactly when Molly Graham became interested in public policy, but it likely happened by high school. This is evident from her list of extracurriculars: Model United Nations, mock trial, and speech and debate. By graduation, her classmates had anointed her as the student most likely to become a member of Congress.

“Which is very funny,” she said. “Because in college, I realized that maybe I wasn’t meant to be in Congress. It seems like a horrible job.”

But the passion for policy endured, even as Graham’s studies shifted toward design. Fortunately, there was considerable overlap. Graham first noticed it while serving as Southwest Virginia Legal Aid Society’s rent relief program manager,  after her world was rocked by a change to the form submission process.

“It was the event of the year,” Graham said. “On one page, you had to scroll down to see the submit button, but people didn’t know that, so they’d think they finished it. We had so many people who would end up in sticky situations just because of a scroll. I came away with so many thoughts about how these forms are submitted.”

Those reflections stayed with her. In 2023, Graham joined the Public Policy Lab on a project to revamp Section 8 housing applications in New York City’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development.

“There was a lot of confusion related to the applications—backlogs, errors, and just a lot of people finding that the forms were a huge burden to fill out,” she said. “One of the applications was 30 pages long. It could be a long and arduous process.”

The group began by categorizing each part of the form based on the type of information requested, then reviewed the necessity of each question, going through the list point by point with staff from the housing office. From there, they constructed a loose template for an updated form, then solicited feedback from every type of user, from landlords and government staffers to tenants in Section 8 tenants. And then they did it again. And again. And again.

Overall, it took about 18 months. And Graham loved it.

“I was like, ‘This is the best,’” she said. “I got to spend all day figuring out puzzles—how things fit in, how to ask things. We’d just sit and muse on these things. It was very fun.”

In general, Graham’s interests often lean toward the esoteric, such as ham radio (“It’s a lot of talking to old guys about their tuna salad recipes”) and magnet fishing, where you attach a magnet to a rope and cast it into a body of water to see what it will attract. (Bottle caps, mostly.)

“I have a lot of old-man hobbies,” she said.

Rachael Zuppke: A Mind for Systems

Revamping court forms is a dream for Rachael Zuppke, who pursued a master’s degree in science information because she wanted to revamp court forms. That desire took root at Legal Services of South Central Michigan, where she watched people struggle to navigate the court system without legal representation.

“A lot of that was about how difficult the forms were to read, as well as how they were designed,” she said. “Instead of going to law school, I wanted to pivot to user experience.”

By that point, she had already pivoted a few times. Zuppke’s undergraduate degree is in visual arts; after college, she planned art fairs and worked at a gallery geared toward adults with disabilities. That experience pushed her toward social justice and a legal services job, working directly with people who were negatively impacted by poor design choices.

“The frustrations I felt navigating these systems, it just really made me want to figure out solutions that integrate people’s lived experiences in the process,” she said. “I always had a systems mind. I just didn’t know it.”

As part of her graduate program, Zuppke performed user testing on eviction forms and worked with the Public Policy Lab on a case study on human-centered design and administrative burden. It also led her to meet Graham, and earlier this year, the duo began working to redesign Michigan’s court forms “for ease and to improve engagement,” Zuppke said.

“Michigan is not the only state paying attention to this, but we’re lucky to be able to do this work in Michigan on this specific issue,” she said. “I think court reform is the next frontier for human-centered design and civic tech, so to be a part of that is exciting.”