Stefania Passera

Enhancing Contract Usability and User Experience Through Visualization - An Experimental Evaluation

Contracts are complex just like the business relationships, processes and tasks they seek to describe. Despite being necessary tools for collaboration, most contract users are frustrated by traditional contracts, which are long, overly legal and difficult to understand. Some approaches to managing complexity and designing user-friendly contracts have been suggested, based, for instance, on the principles of proactive law, lean manufacturing/management and plain language. Recent research has explored the possibility of using information design and visualization to facilitate knowledge transfer and collaboration in complex organizational settings. This paper investigates visualization applied to contracts. A contract prototype was created and tested with users, in order to assess whether visualized contracts are more usable and provide a better user experience than traditional text-only contracts. The paper illustrates hypotheses regarding the correlation of visualization, usability and user experience, proposes a test procedure and presents the results obtained.

Transforming contracts from legal rules to user-centered communication tools: a human-information interaction challenge

In this paper, we illustrate how merging contract design with information design, especially visualization, can help to transform contracts (and peoples perceptions about contracts) from legal rules to communication tools. We argue that improved human-contract interaction can maximize the value of commercial relationships, minimize risk, and prevent workplace frustration. Viewing contracts as boundary objects and changing their design to overcome the current challenges offer unexplored opportunities for both research and practice.

Beyond the Wall of Text: How Information Design Can Make Contracts User-Friendly

This study investigates the unique contribution of layout and visual cues to the comprehension of complex texts. Contracts are taken as a key example of cumbersome, complex texts that most laypeople do not like to read, and avoid reading altogether if possible. By means of information design, the meaning of contracts can be made more readily visible and understandable to their intended user-group. An experimental evaluation shows how it is not enough to simply reorganise the text in a more logical, user-friendly order, but real improvements in comprehension speed and accuracy can only be observed when enhancements to the textual structure of the contract are accompanied by an improved layout and other visual solutions.

Flowcharts, Swimlanes, and Timelines – Alternatives to Prose in Communicating Legal-bureaucratic Instructions to Civil Servants

Government-published documents often fail to communicate clearly—not only with citizens but also with professional readers such as civil servants. Visual or multimodal approaches remain rare. This is a particularly unhelpful practice in regard to legal–bureaucratic instructions (e.g., contracts, rules, policies), which exist to guide compliant behavior. This study explores the development and experimental evaluation of a diagrammatic guide of terms and conditions for public procurement that is addressed to civil servants. Results show that the diagrammatic format, compared to prose, significantly enhances comprehension accuracy and answering speed and is perceived as more appealing and functional by users.

Exploring contract visualization: clarification and framing strategies to shape collaborative business relationships

Research about the psychological effects of contracts on relationship quality hints that effective contract design is not only a matter of selecting the right clauses but also of communicating them in the right way. Recent studies have shown the benefits of using visualizations in contracts to advance clarity, but our understanding of contract visualization in practice is very limited, for lack of field research. We conducted a single case study of how a sales team created visualizations to improve the clarity and the ease-of-negotiation of outsourcing contract documents. Our findings suggest that visualizations help bridging three knowledge gaps in the contracting process: inter-firm; cross-professional; and between contracting phases. In particular, visualizations allow for more effective communication and coordination by increasing clarity and helping the parties to frame the contract and their burgeoning relationship positively. The study expands our understanding of contract design as a strategic relationship-building practice.

Reducing Contract Complexity through Visualization - A Multi-level Challenge

In todays networked economy, contracts are everywhere. Most contracts are complex, as is the business they describe. Contracts are not easy to read, and their misinterpretation can cause expensive disputes between the parties. Recent research suggests an alternative to contracts written in legalese, by harnessing the benefits brought by plain language and plain design. Clarity and user-friendliness present a challenge on multiple levels: the contract as artefact, the cognitive capabilities of the readers, and the different contexts in which the contract may be used. This paper focuses on the artefact level. Using recent examples of contract visualization, we investigate ways in which text and images can work together to address the needs of different readers and help them use contracts to secure successful business outcomes.

Diagrams in Contracts: Fostering Understanding in Global Business Communication

Research problem: Business-to-business contracts are complex communication artifacts, often considered “legal stuff” and the exclusive domain of lawyers. However, many other stakeholders without a legal background are involved in the negotiation, drafting, approval, and implementation of contracts, and their contributions are essential for successful business relationships. How can we ensure that all stakeholders in the global business context—whatever their native language or professional background—easily and accurately understand contract documents? This study suggests that integrating diagrams in contracts can result in faster and more accurate comprehension, for both native and non-native speakers of English. Literature review: We focused on the following research topics: (1) ways to integrate text and visuals to create more effective instructions, since we conceptualize contracts as a type of business instructions; (2) cognitive load theory, as it may help explain why contracts are so hard to understand and why text-visuals integration may ameliorate their understandability; (3) cognitive styles, as individual differences may affect how individuals process verbal and visual information, thus allowing us to explore the limitations of our suggested approach; (4) the English lingua franca spoken by business professionals in international settings, their needs and challenges, and the fact that pragmatic approaches are needed to ensure successful communication. Methodology: We conducted an experiment with 122 contract experts from 24 countries. The research participants were asked to complete a series of comprehension tasks regarding a contract, which was provided in either a traditional, text-only version or in a version that included diagrams as complements to the text. In addition to measuring answering speed and accuracy, we asked the participants to provide information about their educational background, mother tongue, and perceived mental effort in task completion, and to complete an object–spatial imagery and verbal questionnaire to assess their cognitive style. Conclusions: We found that integrating diagrams into contracts supports faster and more accurate comprehension; unexpectedly, legal background and different cognitive styles do not interact with this main effect. We also discovered that both native and non-native speakers of English benefit from the presence of diagrams in terms of accuracy, but that this effect is particularly strong for non-native speakers. The implication of this study is that adding diagrams to contracts can help global communicators to understand such documents more quickly and accurately. The need for well-designed contracts may open new opportunities for professional writers and information designers. Future research may also go beyond experimental evaluations: by observing this new genre of contracts in vivo, it would be possible to shed light on how contract visualizations would be perceived and interpreted in a global communication environment.