UX/UI Case study| LEGALICITY

Lucy Necrasova
Sep 9, 2018 · 6 min read

Legalicity is a legal/technology startup based in Toronto, Canada that operates in the patent law and artificial intelligence fields. They are motivated by inefficiencies found in current legal practices and opportunities to resolve them through use of contemporary tech. Their new product NLPatent employs AI to deliver a new generation of patent search experience that is fast and accurate. This solution helps patent lawyers, researches and investors to increase their productivity.

THE CHALLENGE

The client ask was to create a digital experience that would amplify their brand value and trust associated with their startup. Our task was to re-design their website to help achieve these goals. The client was interested in keeping their company website and their product website as separate entities, thus it was up to us to manage the information fragmentation and customer cross-pollination between these two web properties. We needed to create such digital experience that would stimulate users to explore the product as well as the company equally while creating an unmistakable sense of unity for both websites.

TOOLS USED

Sketch, InVision, Omnigraffle

PROCESS

It is a well-established practice to begin work with learning as much as possible about the product and its intended usage. Our team dove deep into research through client interviews, field research, and competitive analysis.

RESEARCH

Competition

We studied established competitors as well as startups and analyzed their best practices. We examined such competitors from the branding, content, UI design, usability and accessibility perspectives.

Since our mandate was to amplify the trust and legitimacy of the client’s brand, we were looking to discover the ways in which the competitors were solving this problem.

Key finding: one of the findings that emerged early was that the majority of competitors had a clearly stated and well-positioned mission and vision statements, something that Legalicity was lacking.

Usability Studies

We tested the original website with a variety of users, asking them three main questions:

How would you describe this company? (First impressions)

Based on their website, do you understand what this company does?

Based on their website, do you trust their professionalism and expertise?

Key findings: while establishing a SUS score was not our primary task, we learned that 65% of respondents were unable to come up with company description. Additionally, half of the respondents were not sure as to what Legalicity does and more than a fifth of those who participated in research didn’t feel the brand to be trustworthy.

PLANNING

UX Design

We combined all our research into an affinity diagram, which helped us identify our mission and design strategy.

Who Legalicity are: Understand who Legalicity is and the team behind it.

What Leagalicity does: Consumers will clearly understand Legalicity’s values and missions.

Legitimacy: Gain consumers trust in Legalicity’s values and expertise.

To help our design process and stay on track of our mission, not forgetting whom we are designing for, we created a proto-persona. Such a persona was informed by our research and understanding of who an average product user is and their goals and pain points.

UI Design

All the information we gathered during the discovery phase enabled us to better understand the client, their company, their product as well as their customers. After summarizing our research findings, we created an inception sheet that combined all our inspiration and characteristics of Legalicity. Our client’s brand is to be: inventive, clever, personable, friendly, helpful, legitimate, capable, professional, balanced, energetic, clean, minimal, balanced and many more. All these characteristics helped us set up a mood board for the client.

Mood Board

Style Guide

Colors and Decorations

The selected color palette was to convey feelings of friendliness while being smart, capable and bright. Use of a chevron design element will position the brand as strong, professional, directive and forward-thinking.

Design

We created a set of low-fidelity sketches, which were then converted to mid-fidelity mockups, paying attention to our mission and primary users. Once completed, we carried another round of usability research. This round revealed several important findings which were incorporated into the design.

Key findings: we discovered that users would prefer a more general navigation model since participants did not know automatically what NLP (product) and Legalicity Buzz (blog) meant until they clicked on those links in the navigation. We moved from using branded product names as navigation labels to using simple, understandable words that would describe the products or services. This resulted in a higher click-through rate.

NLPatent widget

We positioned NLPatent widget and value proposition as the second point of interest on the site, immediately following the values/mission statement. From our testing, adding an image/GIF helped convey the clarity of the company and their product. The ‘Learn more’ call to action provided access to NLPatent external site.

Our team page

Outlining the team’s strengths in a more appealing manner (structurally and visually) was one of the goals we’ve set for ourselves. This enables the client to create a more personal connection between their customer and staff and opens gateways to LinkedIn.

Prior to this change, users didn’t know names were hyperlinked to LinkedIn and only glanced over text. Once updated, the bios section became more digestible and visually appealing.

Our story page

We made this section more personable, putting the faces behind the legal tech company, providing a sense of connection and community. Additional attention was paid to typography, with the use of medium font to amplify important content, increase scannability and create a certain cadence to the reading experience.

Legalicity Buzz page

The initial design of the page lacked hierarchy and presented all articles as equally (un)important. We knew that our customer takes great care and pride in their regular publications and wanted to amplify the recency of certain articles. Updated layout created a sense of urgency associated with the latest posts.

Legalicity logo exploration

FINAL PROTOTYPE


CONCLUSION

Client presentation went exceedingly well and they were pleased with our work. We have met the client’s requirements in amplifying their brand and creating a sense of confidence and clarity about Legalicity’s work and products; while focusing the website’s narrative around the themes of innovation, expertise and trust.

LucyNecrasova

UX Designer

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