Design study · District court · Kansas
How can the court help you today?
A court redesign concept that opens with a plain-language question, because the people who most need a court website are the ones least equipped to navigate one.
Accessible redesign concept. Not the live Johnson County District Court website.
- Court website design
- Self-help center
- Daily docket
- Jury duty
- Multilingual
- Accessibility
Johnson County District Court — open the working site
Case study overview
The problem
Court websites are written in the vocabulary of the institution — divisions, dockets, filings, case types — and used mostly by people without lawyers. A self-represented resident facing a name change, a small claim, or a parentage matter has to translate their real-life problem into court terminology before the navigation will help them, which is exactly the barrier the court's own self-help program exists to remove.
The approach
The homepage asks a plain-language question and answers it with the six things residents actually do: the Self-Help Center, paying a fine or fee, the daily docket, jury duty, court services, and the nominating commission. A second cut organizes help by audience — self-represented residents, attorneys, jurors — because those three groups need genuinely different things from the same pages. Live court notices, including docket reassignments and the district's move to the state eCourt case management system, sit where a returning visitor will see them rather than in a news archive. Spanish and Chinese are offered at the top level.
The result
Twelve routes covering self-help, the docket, the calendar, judges and directory, court services, and search, structured as the searchable, mobile-first service model the RFP asked for and built from the court's current navigation and public county contact information.
Have something similar in mind?
Need a civic tool with this shape?
Stoa designs and ships resident-facing tools, internal workflows, and public service interfaces that stay fast, legible, and accessible from day one.