Contract design - an experiment
Designing a contract to ensure the parties all understand the agreement
The brief for this university project was to explore the ways that visual communication design can be used to explain the content of contracts better.
Contracts are typically drafted with the worst-case scenario in mind: litigation. But the primary purpose of a contract is to ensure that the parties do what they’ve agreed (eg, make a payment or deliver services). Ensuring that the parties understand their contractual rights and obligations is vital to the underlying contractual relationship.
I chose to work with an example of an Occupation Right Agreement (ORA) for a retirement village in New Zealand. ORAs are public information available online from the Retirement Villages Register held by the Companies Office. I adapted a real contract to a fictional situation.
Target audience
The primary audience for this project is prospective and current residents of a retirement village in New Zealand (ie, people 65 years and over). A large proportion of this group have a disability of some kind, so accessibility of the content was a primary concern. In the timeframe available, I focused on a digital experience that would allow the information to be accessible to a wider range of people than a print document. However, I'd expect a redesigned print document to be part of the wider experience.
Before and After
These pages are indicative of the redesign and are not one-to-one representations of each other:
Some features of the redesigned contract:
- accessibility standards for web met
- left hand navigation doubles as a table of contents and a progress bar. It can be hidden at any time to allow the user to focus on the content.
- timelines can be accessed on each page where required.
- The site encourages a linear navigation process to ensure that all parts of the contract are read and understood. Also, research suggests that (currently) older users prefer to navigate content in this way rather than through dynamic linking.
- visual, audio, and audio-visual explanations of concepts and terms and conditions
Definitions are reproduced on the page when needed
This avoids the need to users to move back and forth between pages to understand the content. These can be hidden at any time.
The content is structured according to the real world experience of the resident
The content is grouped by the three phrases of the agreement: 1) moving in; 2) living in the village; 3) moving out. (The grey content is out of scope for this project.)
Visual, audio, and audio-visual explanations supplement the text
This helps the user create the right mental models to understand the many clauses in the agreement. For example, a timeline helps the reader organise the content.
Knowledge checks help the reader embed the correct understanding
These wouldn't form part of the contractual agreement, but from a legal standpoint might be used as evidence of what the parties intended to agree if a dispute went to court.
Clauses are synethised to provide a high level view
Again, these help the user to create the right mental model, but it also allows them to see connections and patterns that might otherwise be hidden. In this example, all of the possible repairs and maintenance payments are summarised and an indication given of who would normally be liable to pay for them.
