Get Smart: Making Complicated Information Simple

I co-taught Get Smart: Legal Communication Design, a pop-up class at Stanford d.school & Law School that explored how communication design can transform the way legal information is presented and understood.

Legal communication is often dense, jargon-heavy, and overwhelming for the people who need it most. Our goal in this class was to apply user-centered design and experience design principles to rethink how legal terms, rights, and conditions could be communicated in a clearer, more engaging, and actionable way.

This was an intensive, two-day course developed with Margaret Hagan (Stanford d.school/Law School) and Alex Gavis (Fidelity Investments). While we initially expected law students to fill the class, the majority of participants came from engineering, business, management science, anthropology, and political science—bringing an interdisciplinary perspective to tackling legal design challenges.

Designing for Comprehension and Action

The class was structured around two key types of complex communication design:

• Design for Insight and Understanding – Helping people process and visualize complex legal information, similar to how data visualizations help make large datasets more digestible.
• Design for Decision-Making and Action – Making legal rules, terms, and warnings easier to navigate so that users can make informed decisions in real-world situations.

We focused on the second category, where legal communication should empower users rather than overwhelm them. We wanted to see what happens when law meets design, and how new communication patterns could make legal documents clearer, more interactive, and more user-friendly.

The Class Experience

The first day was a bootcamp in visual and communication design, giving students a crash course in Gestalt principles, composition, and user experience best practices. Through short, hands-on design exercises, students practiced breaking down complex information and structuring it for better readability and engagement.

On the second day, students worked on real-world legal design challenges in a design sprint format. Each team tackled a specific use case, such as:

• How to redesign terms and conditions for a financial services product
• How to make online privacy policies more engaging
• How to help parents understand the legal agreements for children’s online gaming platforms
• How to create user-friendly disclosures in financial advertising

Each team developed prototypes of legal communication models, which they then tested with users on the Stanford campus. The students came up with a range of innovative approaches, from embedded legal notices within digital products to game-based learning experiences that helped users absorb important legal terms more intuitively.

Key Takeaways and Impact

This class reinforced that legal communication doesn’t have to be static and overwhelming—it can be designed in a way that is interactive, user-centered, and more aligned with how people actually make decisions.

Many of the ideas developed in the class laid the foundation for ongoing legal design projects, including further experiments on how to improve user comprehension in contracts, privacy policies, and financial disclosures. The class also helped shape the field of legal design, which has since gained traction as a way to make legal information more accessible.

This experience was an early example of my work in using design to improve complex systems, bridging law, design, and behavioral science to create more user-friendly experiences. It was exciting to see what happens when legal professionals and designers collaborate to build better ways of communicating legal information—and how much impact design can have in making the law more understandable and actionable for everyone.