Abstract
To help design an environment in which professionals without legal training can make effective use of public sector legal information on planning and the environment – for Add-Wijzer, a European e-government project – we evaluated their perceptions of usefulness and usability. In concurrent think-aloud usability tests, lawyers and non-lawyers carried out information retrieval tasks on a range of online legal databases. We found that non-lawyers reported twice as many difficulties as those with legal training (p = 0.001), that the number of difficulties and the choice of database affected successful completion, and that the non-lawyers had surprisingly few problems understanding legal terminology. Instead, they had more problems understanding the syntactical structure of legal documents and collections. The results support the constraint attunement hypothesis (CAH) of the effects of expertise on information retrieval, with implications for the design of systems to support the effective understanding and use of information.
Acknowledgements
The Add-Wijzer was funded under the European Union eContent programme, as one of a number of projects on the reuse of public sector information. The consortium included an owner and producer of public sector information, the Province of South Holland, a web and e-government development company (Framfab (NL), a private sector online legal information provider (Context Ltd), and two universities – Queen's University Belfast and the University of Stockholm (KTH).
Notes
1eContent was a Multiannual Community programme to stimulate the development and use of European digital content on the global networks and to promote linguistic diversity in the Information Society 2001 – 2005. Details of its successor programme can be found at http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/activities/econtentplus/index_en.htm
2Commercial services such as Lexis-Nexis, Westlaw and Justis. BAILII is a free service.
3HMSO now operates within the Office of Public Sector Information (OPSI). OPSI has been merged into the National Archives. The HMSO pages on statute law are now located at http://www.opsi.gov.uk/legislation/
4Now at http://europa.eu.int/eur-lex/en/index.html under the interface tested, and with a new interface at http://eur-lex.europa.eu/en/index.htm
5The key to the other databases is in .
6There was not enough data to test the relationship between the database used and the difficulties reported. On adding in the database as a factor, the ANOVA failed Levine's test. To test all the relationships would require a full factorial design, testing all combinations. That was not possible in the time available during this content and software development project.
7Five lawyers and five non-lawyers could not find the amendments using HMSO when completing tasks on national legislation.