Prototype: RBot V3
The Prototype: RBot V3 is designed to go where people are asking for help with legal problems (Spoiler – they go to Reddit!) and answer people’s questions with accurate information from BC’s legal support websites.
Over 90% of people take steps to resolve their legal problems. The top two places people look for help are from family and friends, and on the internet. Our research showed that most British Columbians look online for help on the social media site, Reddit. So the JDD Lab built a reddit bot – “Rbot” – to meet people on where they are looking for help and offer the help they are asking for.
In Spring 2024, the JDD Lab collaborated on the Rbot with graduate students at Vancouver’s Centre for Digital Media. The CDM team showed us the benefits of design-thinking and agile, iterative prototyping and generated RBot V3.
CDM Prototyping Process:
Our CDM team included graduate students with experience in user experience, user interface, business, art, project management and more. After the project kick off, we went through four phases of work: discovery, ideation, iteration and delivery.
In discovery, the CDM team learned how the Prototype Rbot is trained with data from high-quality legal support websites in BC. It is “AI on Guardrails”. It responds to a post and directs a person to the help they are looking for. In ideation, they asked questions we never would have thought to ask.
What We Learned:
Here are some of our biggest learning points.
First, the CDM team asked some unexpected, eye-opening questions. For example: were we determined to use only Reddit? What if people moved to another social media platform? We realized it was important that the Prototype RBot be able to move with people if they went to another platform looking for help.
In another example, the CDM team pointed out that the JDD Lab is designed to share innovations like the Rbot: did we want to “bury” the RBot on Reddit where only redditors would see it? Of course not!
Second, the CDM team did so much more than we expected! They tested the RBot, showing that the Rbot really does help people. They also built us this website so we could share the RBot with you. For more on what the CDM team did, watch this video report:
Prototype RBot Bonus Point:
This is the JDD Lab in action! The JDD Lab runs both a research engine and prototyping teams. With the Rbot, we identified an evidence-based opportunity to improve people’s access to justice, and then build a prototype to help. Now we are iterating that RBot. Next we will generate RBot Version 4: Watch this space!