How important is to have a good UX/UI for Legal Tech?
If one of your employees showed up to work in rumpled clothing or created seven extraneous steps for each task on their to-do list, it’s unlikely they’d survive in your team for long. So why should you expect any less out of your legal technology?
Even with the best of intentions, if your case management system is poorly designed, it will do more harm than good. It will either be improperly used, resulting in costly and time-consuming errors that frustrate your clients and employees, or it won’t be used at all, which is as useful as flushing money down the drain. In order to get a new system to stick, it’s imperative that you keep user experience in mind when you’re selecting or designing one.
The term user experience, or “UX,” might bring to mind clean lines, sleek interfaces, and quick-loading mobile apps. But user experience is about so much more than good design principles. At its essence, UX is about remembering that your clients and employees are still people. It’s about bringing them tools that help solve problems or make their daily work easier. Put another way, user interface, or “UI,” is the tool you give your employees or customers, and UX is how well it works.
But counterintuitively, UX shouldn’t be something your customers or employees have to think about. It should be effortless and it should make their workflow easier, not harder.
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A great user experience isn’t necessarily one that is fancy, but one that accomplishes things in the fewest number of steps. The BMW app, with a paltry 2.8 rating on Itunes, is a great example of what not to do. Although sleek and beautifully designed, the app requires over a dozen steps just to unlock your car door — something that can be accomplished without an app in two steps!
In a case management system, it’s important that every icon has a reason for being where it is and everything flows logically together.
Good UX is especially important for firms or individuals who work in legal services. There are so many factors and forms that go into running a legal practice, and it’s a lot easier to mess up a system with new technologies than it is to make things run more smoothly. In order to be successful, a new case management system has to actually be used — and busy lawyers just aren’t going to make the effort if the system isn’t designed with their workflow in mind.
On the other hand, great UX can have extraordinary results for your team. A well-designed product roadmap and a people-centric outlook can help you save serious money. But increasing efficiency through this process, large companies can increase their volume of sales exponentially. Recently, one workforce management company that overhauled their UX process increased their sales from $240 million to more than $1 billion.
But even small companies can benefit tremendously from taking UX more seriously. There’s a lot of data entry involved in the life of a lawyer, and a case management system with great user experience will inevitably mean that employees will spend less time filing forms and have more time to do the things they’re great at doing. For example, if 5 of your $150-per-hour employees typically spend 30 minutes a day on case management and you can reduce that amount per employee by even 5 minutes a day on average, you can save over $18,000 in billable work over the course of a year.
UX for enterprise systems is incredibly important when you’re handling sensitive information, fickle clients, overlapping case loads, and complicated workflows. Great UX means your employees spend less time on your case management system and more time doing their jobs. But it also means that your entire team is able to communicate more effectively. Lawyers, by nature, often keep a lot of their notes, forms and files on paper. Unless you’ve got a small office and are incredibly organized, this is system will inevitably result in the occasional lost or misplaced file. But even if you implement a digital case management system, if it is poorly designed, your employees won’t use it. The jobs of legal employees are confusing enough, and your case management system shouldn’t contribute to that problem. A great system, on the other hand, will be easily integrated into your client and employee workflows, increase the ease of collaboration, reduce training costs, decrease user errors, and provide a clear benefit to all users involved.
Since your employees have lives outside of work, they’re likely very efficient at using Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and other social media sites. Designing a case management system that mimics the design of these apps will save you money because they’re intuitive and easy to use.
The simpler and more intuitive the design, the easier it will be for your employees to integrate into their workflow. And the more integrated case management is in your employees’ workflows, the more accurate and collaborative your case management system will be — saving you time, money, and hassle.
