Goodlawyer
playbook
UX ProjectTimeline:
5 weeks
Role:
UX Researcher/UX Designer
Tools:
Figma, Adobe Illustrator
TL:DR
Goodlawyer connects solo lawyers with small businesses, offering affordable legal services. Despite having the Playbook for autonomous work, many lawyers still rely on the Legal Concierge team for answers easily found in the Playbook. We conducted user research via surveys and direct interviews, discovering that lawyers, working in a fast-paced environment, struggle to find the Playbook on the platform. In response, we developed a quick search feature on the user dashboard, providing fast and easy access to the Playbook and encouraging both existing and new users to utilize it more effectively.
Goodlawyer is a platform to connect solo lawyers to small businesses and entrepreneurs who need legal services, by removing legal barriers and concepts such as billable hours, to increase affordability.
To help the lawyers on the platform work more independently and efficiently, Goodlawyer launched a digital resource for their lawyers called the Playbook. It is a comprehensive guide that outlines the services on the platform, as well as provides useful tips to help lawyers succeed.
Background
Lawyers on the platform are underutilizing the Playbook and are using the Legal Concierge team as their primary resource when they have questions. This causes strain on the Legal Concierge team because it limits their ability to attend to other responsibilities.
The Problem Statement
User Research
To better understand the background of the problem, we had a meeting with the lawyer in residence at Goodlawyer and gained some great insights about the platform.
1. The technical onboarding process was introduced about a year ago and the Playbook was introduced only a couple of months ago. Before the playbook was introduced, the user habits on the platform was to ask for help from the Legal Concierge team via phone calls or slack messages.
2. Goodlawyer’s current strategy is to introduce mandatory training on how to use the Playbook in the onboarding process, cultivating user habits for the new lawyers.
Stakeholder Interview
3. Many updates on the platform are introduced via emails or at Goodlawyer’s monthly huddles. After the huddles, recap emails will be sent to the lawyers. The Playbook was introduced in the June Huddle Summary email. From the communication data provided by Goodlawyer, the open rate is only 51.5%, and the click through rate (redirect users to the playbook) is only 4.3%.
The interviewees and survey participants are lawyers who are currently active on the platform. They are a mixture of recently onboarded lawyers (< 6 months )and lawyers who have been on the platform for a long time (> 1 year).
One of key findings from the survey is that more than half of the interviewees have been using the Playbook, and will go directly to the playbook before contacting the Legal Concierge, and users do think the Playbook can provide value in answering their questions.
User Survey
During the user interviews, the common issue shared by the majority of the interviewees is that they would like to have answers right away as they have busy schedules.
Another pain point lawyers experienced is if they missed the monthly huddle, they will most likely miss the information about the updates on the platform. Similar to the finding answers in the Playbook, they would have to search through the crowded inbox. This could be one of the reasons that contributes to the low open rate and click through rate of the communication email.
We’ve also learned that over half of the interviewees mentioned that they often use the search feature in the Playbook.
User Interview
“What I’d love to keep is the excellent Google-like search function at the top. I always search the service first to see if there’s an existing quote, and to see what the service includes before deciding if I need to contact Legal Concierge.”
From the insights gathered, we defined 2 personas, one is Albert, the experienced user who has been on the platform for more than 1 year, and Priya, who has been on the platform since the playbook was introduced 4 months ago.
Define the Problem
Personas
Albert is a lawyer with 20+ years of experience who has been on the Goodlawyer platform for about a year and a half. He has been focusing on working on larger projects and as a result has become rusty on the pricing details of micro-services. He would like to incorporate more micro-services into his schedule in order to gain more clients.User
Get more clients and more big projectsBuild rapport with his clients and peersReceive positive reviews from his clients
Need
In addition to using the Playbook as a reference for services and pricing, he also uses the Playbook to learn about tips for success on the platform.Insight
Priya is a 35 y/o lawyer on Goodlawyer who has a side business as a life coach. She has been on the platform for about 6 months and is still building her client list. As of now she has been offering micro-services.User
Maximize her income on the platform by working quickly and efficientlyNurture relationships with clientsGet good reviews from clientsGet bigger projects!
Need
Priya is extremely busy and prefers to have quick and concise updates/briefs about what is going on within the Playbook and the platform as a whole.Insight
We then facilitated a problem definition workshop to introduce Albert and Priya, and their journey with the platform to the team and the stakeholders, and brainstormed for the potential problems they are facing.
One question emerged from the exercise:
How might we improve the access to the Playbook for lawyers?
As the shared challenge that Albert and Priya are facing is that they do not have time to scan through the Playbook. They work at a fast and focused pace.
Problem Definition (How Might We)
In the Ideation workshop. We categorized the Playbooks users into 3 groups below, and developed our design approach for our solution:
Ideation
We believe that lawyers on the Goodlawyer platform will increase their use of the Playbook as a result of including a search feature on the lawyer dashboard, thereby decreasing the strain on the Legal Concierge team.
Hypothesis Solution
Our solution to this challenge is to provide a quick search feature directly in the user dashboard where the user will login and see it every day, which is not only providing quick access to the playbook, but also serves as a constant reminder for users.
Prototype
Low Fidelity Wireframes
We sketched some low fidelity wireframes to incorporate different search patterns, and explore the locations and formats of the search feature. We presented our designs to the dev team, and got some feedback on the technical feasibilities based on current resources.
We selected this approach, the design rationale for it is to lower users cognitive load by providing navigation menu and auto complete search pattern. Through this feature we also like to address the feedback we got from the user interviews regarding the extra effort to find platform updates and month huddles highlights.
High Fidelity Prototype
Our design inherits the existing Goodlawyer UI elements to ensure the branding message is cohesive.
After we developed the high fidelity prototype, we conducted a usability test with 5 participants. The test has 2 test objectives:
If the users notice the search feature and understand its purpose
If the users utilize the navigation menu underneath the search bar
The test result has shown that
All the testers noticed the notification bubble, however, 2 out of 5 testers did not read the text in the bubble, as a result, it took them longer to understand that they could access the Playbook from the magnifying glass icon.
3 out 5 testers solely relied on the search bar, and 2 out of 5 testers utilized the navigation menu
See detailed report below:
Usability Test
Based on feedback from our usability tests, we decided to replace the search icon with a search field to make the search feature more clear and obvious.
Iteration
Prototype Demo