UX Research
Product Design
Brand Strategy
4 Software Engineers and 3 Corporate Lawyers
Rheto is a web platform service that connects clients who are looking for a lawyer. Search the database of lawyers, sift through reviews left by previous clients, and set up a consultation all in one place.
6 Months
Advertisements and legal websites are dodgy and typically skip out on the exact information clients need to make an informed and independent decision. That's why majority of lawyers are found by word of mouth. How might we create a high trust system that helps clients find and connect lawyers more efficiently?
The most important client criteria is available for quick view before navigating to the lawyers detailed profile page. Rings with colour indicators allow for a quick review on criteria deemed most important in user interviews.
Everything a client would want to know is on the lawyer's profile page. Organized by bounding boxes, objective information is included on the left, and subjective reviews and ratings kept on the right.
Clients can contact potential lawyers instead of saving numbers or email addresses and manually keeping track of conversations. Key information is included on the right, and they can directly edit a consultation booking within the interaction pane.
Initial consultations can be set up through 3 easy steps. Enter your problem, your availability and your payment.
I interviewed 8 people ranging from ages 21 to 57, to better understand how a user would navigate the pursuit for a lawyer. Majority of users wanted a referral. Additionally, users who did not know of previous clients or couldn't find reviews mentioned they would have difficulties in validating their qualitative criteria and had to rely on their intuition. Many also made assumptions about there being direct correlations between pricing, firm size/prestige and ability to deliver.
Based off of casual conversations and a preliminary online search, there was a definite untapped potential to help people better find lawyers. These findings were a good start, but I needed to understand exactly where current methods were falling short. I used a qualitative research approach by interviewing people, running a diary study and conducting a competitive analysis.
I ran one diary study to determine the different stages of the current user experience. I had initially planned to run multiple, but the single study ended up functioning as a supportive role for the sentiments expressed during the interviews instead. Synthesizing the information collected from the interview along with the study, I mapped out the current user journey and defined opportunities for us to explore.
No one site encompassed all the key information that would help clients make an informed decision without navigating elsewhere for more details.
Focusing on the Canadian and local Quebec market to start off with for our initial launch, we found that our target audience of lawyers and more specifically sole practitioners, were abundant.
Taking the information I found in the interviews and competitive analysis, it was critical to think about the underlying implications of my learnings. I narrowed it down to three over arching pain points and generated insight driven personas to help the team better empathize with the user we were building for during our brainstorming sessions.
Hidden information
Majority of firm websites withhold / don't display even the most basic information and details about a lawyer and require clients to call in to find out more before even scheduling a consultation.
Keeping track
When you're searching on multiple sites, there’s no easy way to compare directly without opening multiple tabs. The information is scattered and it's difficult for the user to keep track of who/what they've looked at.
Validating their criteria
During the interviews, the users mentioned characteristics that they would look for when choosing a lawyer to work with. Criteria such as clarity, responsiveness, agreeableness and expertise were often mentioned. However, it is difficult to validate these qualitative features without reviews or references available. In most cases, people just assume lawyers who charge more are superior.
These insight driven personas turned stories give us two very different use cases who find common ground in wanting to find the perfect lawyer.
The team and I used cognitive walkthroughs to help define the user flow. This helped me later on with the information architecture. The sketch below is a high-level construct of task flows from the lawyers' perspective.
During our sprint we came up with a lot of ideas that could help solve the problem. I mapped a few of the best ones out onto a chart and we voted. Orange stickies were implemented, grey ones left for future scalability. Important features we chose include:
With all the information scattered, I knew the solution was to create a single storage for it all. The question then, was what information was important to include and how to present it in the simplest and most effective way possible.
From the research conducted, we had to make sure we were providing all the necessary information a client would need to make their decision. We wanted to focus on details that aren't always included on websites and search engines but can go a long way in helping the client make a decision. For example, 'languages spoken' could help an immigrant family who doesn't speak the local language, 'areas of expertise' would help in more niche cases, and 'fee structure' because budgeting is really important, especially if the case has potential to rack up a large bill.
One of the first things I did was create a style guide and the landing pages. This helped me anchor the visuals and guide me in the rest of my designs for the site to maintain consistency in the look and feel.
Designing the user interface required intentionality and thoughtful consideration of the brand identity and persona of the platform. Guiding principles and the style guide helped ground the details in keeping a playful and trustworthy feel - an embodiment I curated that starkly contrasts most lawyer websites.
The lawyer's profile page was the most important one to get right. This page had the most important information, and I wanted to present it in a way that made sense. I kept the most important information at the top including the bios (personality), ratings (credibility) and contact buttons (easy access). I also added bounding boxes and a two column approach to group the information so that it was not overwhelming, and added drop shadows instead of borders on the groups for a cleaner, more modern look and feel.
At the beginning I was overly ambitious about what I wanted our site to be. I naively thought that a successful website would have lots of features and pages for the user to navigate around. Through the research process alone, I realized I was wrong - what the users needed in this whole process is simplicity. I learned that the best thing that I could do was organize all the information in a cohesive format and guide the user in their search.
This project was large in scope and this case study only covered the client facing side of Rheto. Next, we will be finalizing designs and feature implementations for the lawyer dashboards so that they can effectively manage the clients who are considering working with them.
