Keeping BunTool Simple

This is a reference for now and for the future, and for people who have kindly asked me to extend the features of BunTool to add new options or other functionality.

BunTool is, first and foremost, an app to make preparing legal bundles easy. It’s designed to be accessible to as many people as possible, with the three design goals being:

• Design Goal A: to be highly accessible to people unfamiliar with the legal sphere (like litigants in person),
• Design Goal B: to save time for legal advice charities, pro bono lawyers, and other lawyers hopefully reduce the stress and admin that these people face, and
• Design Goal C: to create bundles that work well across the English legal sphere.

Importantly, these are roughly in order of importance, meaning that it’s not worth making things easier for lawyers, or to implement the rules of additional tribunals, at the expense of confusing litigants in person.⊕

In short, it is a way to reduce the need to study up on various rules, and reduce the need to learn new software, at a stressful time during litigation. It seems to be going well: it has made over 20,000 bundles so far and helped (I presume) thousands of people to present their cases.

I write “I presume” because there is no user tracking:⊕At least, I’ve tried as hard as I can to turn off any personal data collection or similar functionality, including in Cloudflare which hosts the site. What this means is that I only find out who and how people are using it when they decide to let me know, and there are generally three different types of emails:

1. Emails from people (an equal mix between litigants in person and lawyers/judges) who just want to say thank you, or donate to the running of the site. These emails make my day every day, and make the work worthwhile.
2. Emails from people who have found a problem with how the app operates (bug reports). These are always welcome!
3. Emails from people who have had an idea for how to extend the functionality (feature requests).

The last kind is where the problems come in. In my experience feature requests are always made in good faith, almost always well-thought-out, and very often excellent ideas that I would enjoy adopting.

Unfortunately, I can’t adopt all the suggestions, even the excellent ones, because making the thing too complicated would violate Design Goal A: To keep things simple. Extending functionality (by definition) means adding complexity, which will end up overwhelming new users.

“New Users” here includes virtually everyone in Design Goal A mentioned above: people who are not familiar with courts by definition will not be repeat users of BunTool, so I presume that everyone comes to it fresh and unsullied. As UX designer Marcin Wichary recently wrote:

If you are familiar with an app, armed with your desire paths and motor memory, you have a lot of capacity to just ignore new menu items, new panels, and new complexity – provided it doesn’t get in your way. New AI option? Turn it off. New tab? Never click on it. New alternate way of doing things? Just continue with the old way. But as a new user, you don’t have that history, or that experience-backed confidence that a bunch of stuff can simply be ignored as it’s not crucial to everyday operation.

This is, incidentally, why I keep the colours of BunTool bright and the logo as a friendly hot cross bun. Every time I open up my laptop to work on it, I start by going to the app page and remembering that it’s meant to be friendly and welcoming. I’m told that other bundling apps have succumbed to the complexity and have a thicket of menus and optios.⊕I’m told they’re complex but in fact, I’ve never used any, not even BundleDocs (which is a popular solution for lawyers) at all, for fear of accidentally copying. That makes sense for a specialist tool for specialists, but not for BunTool.

Some features I’ve implemented include making bundles printable double sided (by inserting an optional blank page if a document would otherwise begin on an even page), and supporting section management. Another popular request from litigants in person and charities alike was making bundles compatible with Family Court “Bates” numbering,⊕

Others are less compelling: things like supporting variable table border widths (I did add enable/disable borders), and bundles for very specialist trade mark proceedings are less compelling and would be more likely to break the design fundaments.

So, if you’ve suggested an idea and I haven’t been able to implement it - sorry! I don’t mean to be rude, and I hope you understand.