AI Platform for law firms
My role
Product Designer - scooping MVP, research, feature scoping, UX design, UI design, Prototyping, Stackholders & developers collaboration.
Team
2 Product Designers; 1 frontend developer; 2 backend developers;
1 DevOps; Lead designer; 2 project managers; Sales representative; 1 QA
Company
This is a SaaS platform designed to simplify and automate the lobbying process for legal services to provide individuals and businesses in the USA the opportunities.
The project had a lot of changes and compromises from the development, design teams & stakeholders, but the launch should be started in 2024.
The maximum unoptimized, inefficient, and confusing process of interaction between lobbyists and law firms forced the client to turn to us.
My role as one of the Product Designers was to analyze the client's proposed concept, define the MVP scope based on the data, and create a product that meets stakeholder expectations and solves the stated problems above. Prioritize the feature set, and collaborate with developers & another designer, and the rest of the team members.
Understanding & Empathize
The guys had already come with their ideas and developments. There was a certain scoop of functionality that they would like to see, but could not bring to any understandable form.
The described process of working and achieving the goals of lobbyists, revising the law and working with it was quite difficult to understand even for the experts themselves.
The calls with stakeholders were broken up into several pieces to maximize efficiency.
Thanks to the personalities on the stakeholder side, we were able to learn more about the users, their pains, and their work process. A project map and timelines were drawn up.
Discover & Research
After talking and analyzing the information from the target audience, we started collecting information about state political processes, stages of passing laws and research of state platforms and resources with legislations, bills, congress, etc.
In addition, we analyzed the provided layouts and ideas by the client. General user flow and some wireframes were taken into account and adjusted. For the rest, additional research of competitors and similar solutions was conducted.
Collaborative lobbying teams are complex and more often than not work remotely. Even if some software is used, there is too much of it to work efficiently.
State registries are difficult to visualize and to find the necessary information.
The speed of work/provision of services by law firms is very low. Writing and correcting bills is so labor intensive and takes a lot of time. After that the bill goes through many stages of approval, which in turn also takes time, as a result lobbying for a certain legislative act can take a year or more.
Also from the interviews we noticed that a large number of representatives of the law, people from 40 years old and more, and quite often they simply ignore e-mails, considering it not important. But they give a lot of weight to physical letters.
Initially, stakeholders brought the main problem - the painful, complicated and very time-consuming lobbying by law firms and its solution - AI solution.
But with the help of researches, interviews, we found out what can close another problem in the form of inconvenient, complex interaction between law firm team members, between the team and stakeholders.
And so, in MVP, we focused on three goals:
1. Make the firm's team and communication with lobbyists and other representatives of the law convenient and efficient through a single platform;
2. Simplify case management and legislative work through AI;
3. Send physical letters instead of emails. Based on the age of legal representatives, they tend to treat physical mail with more care.
Wireframes.
Due to the client's decision, the wireframes part was skipped. The client's improved layouts became the basis for future screens. They were used to start the User Flow, which was then improved/changed as development and changes were made.
Moodboard & functional realization
Since we were building the product from scratch, we started by researching functionality and patterns that we could implement in our future project. To save time, all this was combined with UI realization and selection of other elements in the moodboard.
Branding
Branding was also taken as a basis for the branding with which the client came to us and wished to be based on it.
UI
We started to make the concepts. Two concepts were presented, from which one was successfully chosen and another product was developed based on it, the style of which adhered to the main concept.
All necessary pages were developed to get the user to the main page of the dashboard: login, registration, forgot password, corner cases, etc. A personal profile was processed, taking into account secure recovery and/or change of login data; a profile for the company and customization. Also dashboard, tasks, calendar, events, and other common parts of the interface.
Legislation & Collaboration
A simple, light visible and well-structured display of relevant data, laws and legislation with future tracking (has the president signed) will help people to better navigate and not waste time looking for bills, staffers, etc.
AI Wizard
Thanks to OpenAI's API solution, a model has been integrated that allows for quick analysis, drafting of legislation and amendments. Quite often laws as such have hundreds of thousands of words. Therefore, The company used a limited solution for the first time, which was rather improved.
Mail sender
Based on the data we received from surveys and polls, the majority of law representatives are more attentive to physical mail. Integration with a third-party service that is responsible for sending physical mail helped us to realize this feature.
Development and constraints
The client supervised the process from the development side and quite often decisions were made not on the basis of usability, but on the basis of the client's own decision and convenience of development. Also, due to the use of a certain engine and code writing style, there were discrepancies with the approved design and we had to change some things on the fly, while updating the design layouts.
Government research area
It was interesting, sometimes boring and difficult to master large amounts of data from government sites about the structure of the legislative branch of government, stages of passing laws, etc. in order to develop a logical and consistent design.Thanks to the team and stakeholders who shed light on the issues of this topic.
Backlog compilation
In the absence of any competitors and limited testing, it was a challenge to determine further features for the project, once the initial MVP was implemented. I used the help of product manager and user journey mapping techniques to identify further backlog that we could discuss with the team.
- An ambitious and quite promising project, which in the future may offer users (not only law firms and lobbyists) alternative access to legislative acts.
- Very scrupulous approach to the product, on the part of the stakeholders. They are really committed.
- Sometimes sacrifice logic and convenience in order to test ideas.
- The speed of work is quite high.I truly believe that every project has something to learn from.
- Always communicate my professional conclusions, and be an advocate for users to the last, but be able to find compromises, as the customer always makes the decision.
- Once again, I have found that my approach to finding a balance among business, user-friendliness and appearance is, for me personally, the golden mean.