Rebuilding a Scattered Resource Into a Toolkit People Could Actually Use

A federally funded legal aid organization ran a national network of partner sites hosting free legal clinics for veterans, but the guidance for how to plan and run one of these clinics existed only as a flowchart with linked folders, scattered across a shared drive. There was no live web resource pulling any of it together, so partner organizations were left to piece it together themselves, with no consistent starting point for someone new to the work.

Our UX team of two interviewed two practitioners with direct clinic experience: a lawyer who had run veterans legal clinics at his firm for over a decade, and a legal aid staffer from a state-level partner organization who had run a grant-funded remote clinic program. Both conversations reshaped the project's starting assumptions.

The team had been working from the assumption that the toolkit would center on in-person clinic logistics. The interviews made clear that clinics had shifted mostly virtual since the pandemic and largely stayed that way, which meant the whole logistical framing needed to change. They also showed that veteran outreach and recruitment, not legal prep or event logistics, was consistently the hardest part of running a clinic. And veterans themselves needed plain-language, tangible materials to take home, since in-clinic conversations with lawyers could be dense or overwhelming in the moment.

One practical detail stuck with me: a partner organization had already built a physical "clinic kit," a rolling cart of supplies with a maintained checklist, to solve a logistics problem the toolkit hadn't yet addressed. Rather than inventing something new, that solution became a model for one of the organizer-facing resources.

The early sitemap was organized by document type and workflow phase, an approach that assumed users already understood the clinic process well enough to know which phase or document they needed. That didn't match what the research had just shown us: people arriving at this resource were often figuring out the process for the first time, and their needs varied by who they were, not just where they stood in a fixed sequence.

I restructured the toolkit around audience and task instead. The final structure narrowed to four pages:

• A landing page that segments visitors into three groups (veterans who need takeaway materials, clinic organizers, and volunteer attorneys and support staff) and routes each to what they need
• A Planning & Training Guide
• A Running Your Clinic page
• A Resources & Templates page

The landing page's framing, essentially "who are you, what do you need right now," replaced the earlier "here are our forms" logic entirely. That shift was the central bet of the project, and it's what put audience above all else in the final structure.

For the Resources & Templates page, which needed to potentially hold more than 40 downloadable materials, I proposed a visible list format instead of the accordion pattern already available in the organization's design system. Hiding that many resources behind expandable/collapsable interactions would have made it harder for someone who didn't yet know what was available to scan and evaluate relevance, which ran counter to what the interviews had shown about reducing friction for people who were already stretched thin. I worked within the existing design system everywhere else, proposing the new component only where the existing patterns genuinely couldn't do the job.

I also identified overlapping content between the Planning and Running Your Clinic pages and proposed consolidating the detailed logistics into a single downloadable guide, rather than duplicating it across two sections of the site.

Accessibility compliance for the toolkit was addressed by the design and development team as part of the broader project.

The client's response to the wireframes and content strategy was enthusiastic, and the toolkit shipped with a structure, landing page plus three child pages, audience-based segmentation up front, that closely tracks what I proposed. The client also carried the underlying idea behind one of my proposed modules, a prioritized view of the most-used resources, into the live site, even where the final implementation of that module diverged from my original component choice. What mattered was that the rationale behind it held up past handoff.

Putting audience above all was the North Star for this project, and it shows up at every level of the work: the research that overturned an in-person-first assumption, the shift from a document-type structure to an audience-and-task structure, and a component decision built around reducing friction for people already stretched thin. It's also a project where the underlying thinking outlasted the specific deliverable, since the client kept the intent behind a proposed feature even after adapting its execution.