Redefining the way Attorneys manage IP
A Good User Experience for the Legal Industry
The Context
The legal industry needs to keep up with the changing software landscape, which is why so many legal firms are investing in digital transformation.
CPA Global wanted to expand their product offering across Corporate and Small law firms.
The Problem
Australian corporate law firms do not have seamless experience that handles the end-to-end work flow of IPLC (Intellectual property Life Cycle). Docketing is one of the important functionality that integrates multiple systems (Email, Patent Office data and firm data), which has been missing in the landscape of IP software.
The Objective
Research, strategize and design an end-to-end seamless experience between multiple systems to help Australian law firms, with a focus on achieving the 2 KPIs :
- Decrease User Error Rate (UER)by 50% on the previous MVP.
- Decrease Time-on-task by 50%
My Design Process
I follow a basic process involving five phases (discover, define, ideate, prototype and test) which is an iterative process that helps me to understand users, challenge assumptions, and create innovative solutions.
It is not a linear process. So I would go back to different steps and when needed.
Discover
Lacked understanding in customer wants, needs and expectations.
- Current frustrations and pain points?
- What did they really want?
- What did they really need?
Dived into an intensive 2-week research sprint.
- 15 user interviews
- Investigated Attorney forums and portals
- Mapped out a competitor and SWOT analysis
Competitor SWOT
Key Findings from User interviews
The clients are in need to:
- Automate IP docketing tasks when you view or create messages.
- The solution should works across desktop (Outlook on Windows and Mac) and web (Microsoft 365 and Outlook.com)
- The data should be protected by Information Rights Management (IRM) or encrypted in other ways for protection.
And then I synthesized these understanding and findings into concrete UX deliverables, such as personas and user journeys so that the findings is easy to understand, easy to communicate between different teams and even to the stakeholders such as business owners.
Personas
Ideate
Overwhelmed with insights, we needed to start prioritizing to form a strategy.
- Created affinity maps
- Prioritized customer pain points, wants and needs
- Presented the insights to stakeholders
Affinity map
Customer journey map
Prototype
We were on a very tight deadline and developers needed to start building soon.
Lo-fi Wireframes
Hi-fi Wireframes
Step 1
Step 2
Step 3
Step 4
Step 5
Step 6
Step 7
Step 8
Back to Ipendo
Data Sync
Patent Home page
Test
So upon usability tests a 93% of users (14 of 15 users) found that a new design of Email integration (Outlook plugin) was very easy to navigate and achieved the objective of
- Decreasing the Time-on-task by 54% (14min instead of 30 mins on docketing a case)
- Decreasing User Error Rate (UER)by 50% (1 day biweekly to 0.5 day)
Impact
We successfully launched 4 months later and celebrated at Roof Top Bar, Sydney Tower with the entire CPA team! 🍻 🍷
Description
CPA Global
CPA Global is a leading intellectual property technology partner, trusted by over 10,000 of the world’s most respected companies and law firms.