Designing for Trust, Accessible Legal Terms for Coffee Growers
This project was developed while Daniela Vélez was working at Lexia Abogados in Colombia, showcasing a successful application of legal design within the agricultural sector.
The success was driven by a multidisciplinary team of lawyers and designers. This collaboration was essential to ensuring that the final legal documents were not only legally sound and compliant but also intuitive, user-friendly, and aligned with core human-centered design principles for the growers.
Challenge
The National Federation of Coffee Growers of Colombia (Federación Nacional de Cafeteros, FNC), a crucial organization representing over 500,000 coffee-growing families, faced the complex challenge of transforming dense, bureaucratic legal documents—specifically terms and conditions—into formats that were accessible and understandable to their diverse stakeholder base.
Primary Users: The main audience, coffee growers, had varying levels of education, limited legal literacy, and often worked in rural areas with limited access to reliable digital resources.
Core Problem: To maintain legal validity while dramatically improving accessibility and comprehension for a non-legal audience. The complexity of the existing documents created friction and mistrust, undermining the Federation's goal of improving relationships with its members.
Key Stakeholders:
Primary Users (Coffee Growers): Needing clear, actionable information.
Internal Legal Team: Responsible for ensuring full legal compliance.
Regional Coordinators: Needing simple tools to explain the documents in local communities.
Approach
Our approach combined legal design thinking with user-centered methodologies to create a system tailored for this specific audience.
Discovery
We focused on understanding the growers' real-world context and literacy levels.
Contextual Research: We consulted with regional coordinators and community representatives to gather insights into the specific needs and challenges of different growing regions.
Document Analysis: We analyzed the existing legal documents to isolate the most complex clauses and frequent points of user confusion.
Ideation
We moved beyond simple reformatting to redesign the entire user experience.
Legal-Design Collaboration: We facilitated structured feedback sessions with the Federation's legal team to bridge the gap between necessary legal precision and user comprehension.
Sketching and Wireframing: We developed initial concepts for a digital legal document system, focusing on visual hierarchy and clear, step-by-step navigation.
Prototyping and Refinement
We maintained continuous feedback loops to ensure the solution was practical and effective while meeting all legal requirements.
Iterative Prototyping: We developed design solutions—ranging from low-fidelity mockups to interactive digital prototypes—tailored to each user group's needs.
Usability Testing: The prototypes were tested with community representatives to ensure the new language and visual structure were immediately understandable.
Solution
We developed a final digital solution that successfully transformed the complexity of the terms and conditions into a clear, easily navigable system.
The core solution was a designed legal document system that addressed the diverse literacy and technical needs of the stakeholders:
Digital Accessibility: The solution was optimized for low-bandwidth environments, ensuring accessibility even in rural areas.
Clear Structure: We used design elements like color, typography, and clear sections to create a visual hierarchy that guides users through the document quickly.
Actionable Content: The language was made clear and concise, turning opaque legal requirements into easily understood, actionable steps for the coffee growers.
Impact
The project achieved a key organizational goal: successfully strengthening the relationship between the Federation and its growers through clearer, more transparent communication.
User-Based Clarity: The language was clear, concise, and easily understood by both growers and legal professionals, proving that legal clarity does not require complexity.
Actionability: The terms and conditions efficiently guided users through the necessary legal processes, reducing the burden on regional coordinators to explain complex rules.
Accessibility: The content was easy to find and navigate across various literacy and technological levels, supporting the Federation’s outreach to diverse rural communities.
Cultural Alignment: The solution demonstrated that legal design must consider the specific cultural and educational background of the target audience for true comprehension.