Insight Lex: All-in-one solution for legal practice UI/UX Case Study

Hey you, yes You(!), the awesome reader 😇 who has taken some time off to read this article, Welcome to my case study! I’ve tried to create an experience, to help users (lawyers) simplify their day to day tasks and keep a track of their ongoing cases.

How it all began?

So I enrolled myself in a Bootcamp back in August last year by Springboard and was assigned my first ever project of my choice to work upon.

I was looking around for some projects and then I thought there was one right under my nose considering that I have had the first-hand experience in dealing with the difficulties found in the current legal practice first as a law student and then as a lawyer. I discussed with my friends and colleagues and we thought that this field is in need of some serious modernisation. So this is when I decided to start with this project.

It felt a little difficult in the beginning but as they say “ Beginning is half done” and yes starting with the basics always helps, so I trusted my intuition and started with the process. ⚡️

Overview

This project corresponds to the project submitted at the end of the Springboard UI/UX Bootcamp. I wanted to contribute with what I know from my experience as a lawyer. So from this experience, I developed this project through different processes until I reached the high fidelity prototype.

Problem Area

So what is the problem I am trying to solve? Let’s say, the whole mechanics of law is very analog. Allow me to explain my point. When the lawyers are at the early stage of a case they have a tendency to turn to hard copies to research or understand a point of law or get a first-hand update on an ongoing case.

Users need a one-stop app that will help.

This is what I am trying to solve.

The idea of Insight Lex is to provide users (lawyers) who have just started with their legal profession to give them a sense of relaxation and experience the new way of being informed about their daily tasks, track the status of the ongoing cases, or research the point of law.

This app was created by keeping in mind the newbie lawyers.

🎬Design Thinking ”Getting Started”

Mentor (Sheel Damani — a big thank you) support was always there and she clarified all my doubts right from the start. I decided to follow IDEO’s Human-Centered Design and Lean UX Design Thinking process to make sure that my design decisions were supported by user research and feedback.

My Role

As a solo designer, I took the role of UI/UX designer wherein my responsibilities included performing prototyping, storyboarding, usability testing, market research, and mapping potential routes.

Project Brief

• A law app for people who use mobile phone apps but stick to books for pieces of information. These users just communicate within WhatsApp and WhatsApp groups, basic calls, and play youtube videos sometimes for legal information.
• Require case information with key-specific headnotes.
• Track ongoing cases with ease and comfort.
• View the judicial precedent in short with how much the case can be trusted to cite in another court.
• Check out references for the cases and case cited by which other cases.
• Keep a record of all case-related information in one place.

Understanding the product and the market

• Lawyers need to cite and refer to certain cases when they put forward a point in court. Usually, they take help from website databases and books.
• To make the process faster, easy to understand, and boost productivity, a law information app with a simple interface would be helpful.
• A digital diary to record all case and client-related information.

Competitive Analysis

At the very beginning of the project, I spent some time researching other websites/apps offering similar services.

• I wanted to understand the requirements and problems in the field by looking at what the competitors were doing.
• I checked out several apps and websites which provide law databases, checked out their reviews and interface.
• To conclude, we required an application where all the information is present in one place.

Insights from the interview

The next step for me was to get out there and see what the prospective users have to say. So to dig deeper into the problems faced by the lawyers, I decided to take personal interviews on call. I primarily targeted the young lawyers with less than 5 years of experience who could help me understand their side of the story.

The user interviews were extremely beneficial and gave me a good idea of which users' unmet needs my app could help satisfy.

Key takeaways from the interviews

1000…. sticky notes later Affinity Mapping

After I was done with the interviews I spent some time creating affinity maps. This process helped me to sort through the information to synthesize and organize my findings by patterns and themes.

Empathy Mapping

Moving on from affinity mapping the next step was to prepare the empathy maps. It helped me to organize observations and quotes collected from the user interviews conducted to better understand the pain points, goals, feelings, thoughts, and behaviours.

As you can see some of the pain points where subscribing to the current features of a website is very costly and not justified. Lawyers do not make a lot of money in the first few years of their practice.

Personas… connecting the dots

Based on the information gathered during my research, I created 3 user personas — Kumud, Aiman, and Asha. They represented my prospective users and helped me keep them in mind as I was working on my design. I deliberately created my personas to be quite different as I wanted it to serve as a reminder that I need to cater to users with different needs.

Once the research was done, I broke down the problem statement into HMI questions (as I was the one woman army in this project) and have tried to solve those:

How Might I bridge the gap between theoretical knowledge and practical knowledge for a young lawyer?

How Might I bring all types of information about cases in one place?

How Might I reduce the case research timings?

How Might I access research websites freely?

User flow

The next step was to think of many different ways in which my users would be interacting with the app and specific tasks they would want to accomplish. I developed several user flows to know the paths that the user will follow while using the app.

Sketches

I started making design decisions and visualizing a solution based on what I learned from research. I explored solutions to the problem and identified a solution for prototyping.

Now was the time to ideate my solution for which I used the Sketching technique and brought my ideas to life. I was ready to overcome my temptation to start designing solutions now that I thoroughly understand the users and the problems they have.

Case Tracker Page Sketches

Judgment Page Sketches

My Diary Page Sketches

I must say this is one of the important parts of the design before jumping on to a design tool as here at this point I had put my imagination into the paper which is going to set the base for my app’s design.

In case you want to see all the sketches click here.

Low fidelity wireframing

The next step, finally the one I had been long waiting for was - the wireframing.

It helped me establish the design layout and hierarchy without sweating over aesthetic details. This was the challenging part of the entire process. I had to define the hierarchy of the elements that make up each screen. I did not do a great job at it but most importantly I learned where I went wrong.

Branding

Branding was one of the difficult tasks in this project as I needed to make the legal field look appealing to the users. Insight Lex is modern and innovative but trustworthy and professional too. I had to iterate on this a few times to get a more accurate result, which will be seen in the high-fidelity prototype.

UI Design

Finally, the time has come to check out the designs.

In order to see how the screens will work click here.

Usability Testing

The usability testing played a big part which helped me to make some design changes to my screen and also to add some pages which were important in the user’s view.

The results from testing were that the hierarchy of information was sometimes unclear and that the product looked naive and informal for the type of service it was offering.

Learnings

While researching the market to start this project, I realized that there is a need to have information in one place rather than being scattered all over the internet. For me, the biggest concern was how to gather all information and make it readily available for the user.

I tried the neomorphism feature for the first time. I know neomorphism designs look absolutely exciting in the beginning but if it’s not the perfect fit for the problem we are solving, users will abandon the product very soon. After careful consideration, I felt neomorphism would better suit the product’s needs and make users believe in the product. As a UX designer, I think the user is the one with whom we have to walk on the same path to understand his needs and goals of the project till the end. And I realized it the most in the Usability testing part. I assumed my designs were flawless until I showed them to the users and they pointed out some things which I never really thought of before.

Finally, my project reached its destination but my design journey has only begun.