We are delighted to announce that Professor Marcia Gelpe of William Mitchell College of Law will be the chief editor of our module on the Clean Air Act.  Professor Gelpe has been affiliated with William Mitchell for nearly thirty years as professor, associate dean and, now, emerita professor of law.   She also holds an appointment as a Professor Emeritus at the Netanya Academic College in Israel and served for many years as their Director of the Center for Environmental Law (for which she organized numerous national academic conferences on Israeli environmental law) and has participated in various national commissions concerning the environment, pollution and air and water policy.  Prior to beginning her teaching career, Professor Gelpe worked as an attorney at the Office of General Counsel of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.   In addition, she was a member of the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency Board for seven years.  Professor Gelpe’s work on the Clean Air Act should be released on Spindle in the coming months.

Check out this great new post by Peter Tillers on what’s happening with the evidence module, which Peter is creating and overseeing.  It’s also the best description I’ve seen of certain aspects of the whole Spindle Law project.

Lately we have been focusing on improving the usability of the site.    To that end, we have been finding gracious volunteers who let us observe them as they try out the site.   For lack of one-way mirrors or hidden cameras, we try to be as silent as possible — usually enforced with knowing glances at each other  —  to see how users interact without our intervention.   We are constantly reminded that we are so much in the weeds of how the site works, our own sense of what is intuitive cannot be be trusted.     We have found these  “back to the drawing board” moments to be extremely valuable and they have had significant impact on our on-going design changes.

At the same time, we have resisted acting on every suggestion.    Besides the fact that it is difficult to generalize from such a small sample size, we feel that we sometimes  know better.  This can be an awkward position to take especially when it comes to a site that is built for, and ultimately by, the legal community.  Isn’t the customer always right?  This issue came up when Facebook recently redesigned their site much to the annoyance of many of its users.    Some have suggested  that Facebook should listen to their users since without them they would not be successful, whereas others have argued that Facebook executives have a broader view and therefore know better than users.    Facebook’s response was  to recognize the feedback but to mostly keep with their original plans.

Facebook, of course, is a case of a growing site with active users who  pay attention to every change.  For a site just starting out like ours, the circumstances are quite different.   The question is whether the same conclusion holds.   In a recent podcast, Jeff Attwood, the co-creator of Stack Overflow, a relatively new question and answer site for software developers, discusses how he went against the advice of early users in not putting the “Ask a Question” entry box front and center.  He had a vision for a  different kind of Q&A site, more focused on users providing answers, whereas early users were drawing on their experience of other Q&A sites and were expecting a similar experience.  To do something innovative often requires going against initial feedback and in the case of Stack Overflow, its success has proven Jeff right.

At Spindle Law, we face a similar challenge in that our users have experience doing legal research and therefore bring along certain expectations of how the site should work.  Our goal is to bring innovation to legal research, providing a way of finding answers that is not only different but  better than existing sites.    We find that with a little practice using the site, users have an “aha” moment where doing legal research in this way really makes sense.  Our approach then is to give people enough familiarity that they hang on for the ride and a reward that makes it worth it.