Overview of the
Jus Law came to us to help them revolutionize the law firm industry. Every aspect of the practice of law today is dependent on technology as routine communication. However, to utilize that technology, lawyers must switch between different programs, website portals, and multiple vendors. It’s cumbersome and disrupts a person’s set-up. Many endorsed tech features are often not accessible on smartphones and most of the technology platforms are very expensive.
Their platform at the time was outdated, lacked many important features, and needed restructuring. We worked closely with Jus Law and their group of attorneys to come up with an all inclusive platform for both attorneys and clients - bringing everything under one roof for a seamless workflow. Our focus was to help firms reduce costs, maximize profits, communicate with and acquire clients, all while utilizing the best device technologies. For this project, our team consisted of two other UX designers, a Product Manager, and our engineering department to help developed this app across mulitple devices. We offer this on web, iOS, and Android.
Trust the
Research and insights from
We put together a discovery strategy to help validate our hypothesis, organize our due diligence, and set goals for research deliverables to the client.
We kicked off Discovery by interviewing the stakeholders of this project who also happen to be attorneys themselves, to understand their goals and objectives. After gathering general insights on their background, market, and users, we put together a questionnaire for current and potential users. We conducted user interviews with attorneys and clients to get a better understanding of who they are, what their goals, needs, and capabilities are. Below are a few key highlights:
Attorney Insights
Client Insights
We gathered all of the information about our users during this process and finalized our audience. For this project, we will be catering to three different user types:
To make sure we cover all of our bases, we did a Heuristics evaluation and an Audit of Jus Law’s outdated platform. We wanted to identify any important features or functionalities that were problematic based on usability principles.
Areas for improvement:
In order to truly understand what our user journeys are, we started compiling a series of user goals and tasks into a high level map. We created these workflows for all three user types. Instead of a typical timeline, we catered this mapping to focus on main goals and tasks. This allowed us to understand what they do and how they do it.
We started with the attorney product landscapes and looked into the major players in the legal case management software market. We compiled all of our findings into a Google Sheet for each user type.
Our research showed us that our top competitors have very robust platforms and offered a lot of different features.
We also looked into the different approaches for form input and data collection. We noticed some of the competitors forced users to select from a dropdown in some areas while others allowed a custom field.
While researching what others had to offer in the attorney search function, we found a majority of them offer an extensive filter and sort by feature. These were features that Jus Law lacked and could benefit from having.
We also noticed a feature that could take Jus Law to the next level in this area. The comparison feature - allowing users to select up to x amount of attorneys and see a side by side comparison. This would really help clients narrow down their results and in turn, send more potential clients to attorney users.
After we discovered just how robust our competitors were and presented these findings to our clients, they decided to revisit the scope of work. Initially, we were onboard to do an MVP. However, both teams agreed that if we really wanted to be part of the competition, we had to offer more than just the minimum.
This meant adding in more features, such as:
After we agreed on next steps, we hopped back into Discovery starting with User Personas.
During our stakeholder interviews, we were already informed of our primary users: clients, attorneys, and paralegals. Research and user interviews showed us what their major pain points, user needs, and goals were. We created a quick visual for the Jus Law team to reference along with a more robust spreadsheet that also addressed their potential tasks.
Beyond our primary users, we also looked into our secondary and tertiary users. These users were important to note as this platform will be pretty robust and cater to all types of users.
We made high-level recommended site maps for all user-types to get an idea of where we’re going and how it will look once it’s complete. We kept some of the structuring of the old website but made sure the flows were much more seamless.
We developed a detailed feature set using Google Sheets for all three user types. We made sure to call out the features that were not in the initial scope of work by highlighting them. Before finalizing the features, we went through 2-3 rounds of iterations and client updates to ensure we were all on the same page and still on track towards the same goals.
I created a high-level story map with the new feature set to validate our recommendations and that the user journey still allowed them to finish their tasks.
We understand that not everyone likes to dive into a spreadsheet and have to imagine what their product will look like based off of a list of words and sentences. So we decided that it would be best to quickly mock up some lo-fidelity wireframes to show to our client and allow them to visualize their product before we dive into the next phase.
Onboarding Highlights:
Overview Highlights:
Matters and Documents Highlights:
Billing Highlights:
For Jus Law, our engineering team recommended the following integrations for a faster turnaround and better credibility with these familiar applications.
Moving into
We started with the web app first as it gave us a better understanding of the layout and structure. I divided this phase into sprints for our team and started working on the wireframes for each user-type. While creating these wireframes, we also built a prototype to convey our design decisions and the robust user-flows.
Findings:
Challenges:
Solutions:
And Finally,
For this project, we decided to mock up three different options for our client while still maintaining the brand’s identity. When developing these options, we wanted elements that were distinctly different from one another so that we can get sense of what the client wants aesthetically.
Our client’s final decision was to combine two of the designs together and we got this:
Once that design was established, we moved onto the other screens. Given the extensive information and content that this platform offers, we were bound to have multiple repeating screens. So we decided to design and organize the components, elements, and style guide towards only the necessary screens to reduce the amount of time spent on unnecessary work. Our engineering department and Project Manager would be able to reference the wirefraemes and prototype for any questions they might have.
We strive to keep communication open with our clients at Jus Law and to make sure we conduct progress reports with them on a bi-weekly basis. In the middle of our design phase, they requested for us to add in two more features. A discussion was held between both teams and ultimately we agreed to add the following features:
Client - Post a matter for bidding
Attorney - Bidding for clients
This pushed our timeline further as it was not an easy request. This feature will allow client users to post their matter up in a community page where attorneys would be able to “bid” for their work. Similar to an auction, clients can post their matter up along with their budget, compare interested attorneys, and hire whomever they choose by reading over their short brief and getting quotes automatically. This feature was beneficial in many ways as it would not only help a client user find an attorney, but also help attorney users gain potential clients.
Once desktop designs were finished with the new features, we passed them to the engineering team. As they were building that out, we started on mobile designs. For the mobile app, we kept it much more clean and simple for a better user experience. There is much less space to work with and we needed to make sure the information and content was the main focus.
I worked with another UX designer to complete the three user dashboards and, as project lead, I made sure designs were consistent and communication was persistent.
We started with the main global components and then worked our way up to user specific components.
After the components were established, we jumped right into designing the mobile screens.
Let's talk about
Once all of mobile design was approved and finalized, we handed it over to the engineering team for the build. While they were working hard on mobile, we jumped into QA for desktop to help move development along. In this phase, we made sure all features and use cases function across multiple devices.
What I learned:
What needed improvement:
What we longed for:
Overall, our client was super happy with the launch of the platform and I think we did a great job considering the hurdles we faced as a team. The app is live on Android and iOS! Users can also sign up via desktop.
