As legal aid organizations begin funneling more resources into developing online triage systems, LGBT individuals may find themselves an afterthought in the design process.

The design process for any online tool or website involves multiple iterations of user testing. User testing is a catch-all term for the different processes developers employ to determine if a product will fulfill its intended purpose in real world scenarios.

Sometimes those processes are more inclusive to different communities than others. Human centered design processes employ principles that put the end-user at the heart of the design process. It focuses on not only usability of the product to achieve a desired result, but understanding the environment in which the end-user lives, works, and functions. In that way, it can separate usability from user experience. Two products could be equally usable, but without a focus on the individual who employs it, user experience can vary widely.

One tool design experts employ in the iterative process is card sorting. This is a simple way to learn about how end users categorize the information on your website or online tool. Critical to quality card sorting results are the participants included in the process. Without a participant pool that accurately reflects the population that will use the website or tool, the card sorting results will be less inclusive and, therefore, less useful.

Low income LGBT communities face the same kinds of challenges to obtaining legal services as other low income populations with the added difficulty of navigating institutional bias and in some cases state sanctioned discrimination, such as limited access to adoption services or having a rental application denied if the landlord does not approve of an applicant’s sexual orientation.

Civil legal aid organizations that are in the process of designing new tools to serve their clients need to be mindful of designing systems that are inclusive to all populations the organizations serve. An easy way to do that is to include those populations in the iterative design process by ensuring members of a given community are included in user testing.