Legal Aid for Montana
Montana Legal Services Association
Montana Law Help exists to offer legal resources to statewide residents.
The site is targeted to low-income and disadvantaged people in need of legal advice or aid. The previous site was dated in appearance and lacked a modern user experience that would best serve those in need.
Electric Citizen ("EC") already had experience partnering with the Montana Legal Services Association. Previous our team had worked with MLSA, building and designing a new website dedicated to serving crime victims in the state (Montana Crime Victims website).
Based on that positive experience, along with our previous experience working with LawHelp Minnesota, Electric Citizen was hired to redesign the site.
EC is great to work with... they take the time to learn the language of the project ...and try to speak in a way that people not in web development can understand.
We began the project with discovery, where we conducted stakeholder interviews and strategic workshops around goals and audience needs. We conducted user testing before finalizing a new site navigation meant to improve the user experience.
From a technical perspective, we planned the features of the new site, including a new “legal triage” tool that would allow users to interactively navigate their legal issues to find solutions, and a plan to migrate existing site content over to a new CMS (Drupal).
A new design was developed, building on the existing brand and use of more human-centered imagery, while emphasizing clean pathways for users to take action.
Through content strategy and information architecture, we took a large amount of available resources and categorized them into a new set of taxonomy terms that users can browse on their own.
Before launch, our team conducted user testing with Montana residents, adjusting our tools and content as needed to improve user understanding. We helped drafting a script of questions, and conducted moderated testing remotely.
The new website is responsive and accessible. Pages are multilingual, including support for content in both Spanish and English.
The new site has received positive feedback from both staff and state residents, and received multiple web design awards in 2024. Our team continues to support the website today.
