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.
In this paper, we illustrate how merging contract design with information design, especially visualization, can help to transform contracts (and people's 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.
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