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.