WIDÚ Legal: Quick access to legal documents
WIDÚ Legal is a digital platform for legal documents created by AraqueReyna, a top legal firm in Latin America, built and designed by Turpial. The initial idea came from the necessity of the firm to build an online platform, a growing sector in which many firms from the United States and Europe have been in the past years.
Project: WIDU Legal
URL: https://widulegal.com
Type of project: Web App, Online service
Delivery: November 2017 — November 2018
Tools: Django, Payment processing, Ajax
Whenever any person or business needs a legal document, chances are that they need it as soon as possible; the process of finding a lawyer, meeting with him, hiring them for the work and getting the result can take too much time. On the other hand, even if there´s time, no one should be risking drafting sensitive documents if they can get an expert to do it properly. This is why WIDU Legal exists, out of the necessity of people to have quick and safe access to legal documents for a wide number of uses.
Araque Reyna went on the search of a Development company that could build the product they desired the way they wanted. That’s how they came in contact with Turpial Development, as Mauricio and Fernando Carrera, (one of the founding members of Turpial), were childhood friends. Our sales team went on a visit to the firm and met with various members of the board, as did other Dev companies who were interested in the project. Ultimately, and after a second meeting to finish the paperwork, we were selected to work on the project because of how personal and close our approach was of the idea. And we were assigned not only with building the inner workings of the website, but also to be part of the general design process.
After two months of estimations, where members of the firm met with the development team in charge of the project almost on a daily basis, we were ready to begin, as the user stories, and the team was familiar enough with the client’s approach to the project.
The first phase of the project extended for 6 months and during that period the team worked close with the client, with weekly meetings for presentation and exploration of the current state of the product. It was a project that wanted to massify the obtencion of legal documents in Venezuela at first, but with every step we took we realized the potential of what we were building. After 4 months of work, the firm decided to start building WIDU to be something greater: a legal documents platform for various latin american countries. Of course, this meant extra work, for which an extra iteration and another developer were added to the original team of 3 developers.
The way WIDU works is simple: First step after creating an account, the user starts filling a questionnaire with the aspects of the document he wishes to obtain, in case described document doesn’t exist in our extensive catalogue. After answering the questions and only when all obligatory fields are filled, the systems saves the document and sends the user to the payment section. After the due payments are done, WIDU examines the document and, in case it’s correct and valid, a downloadable version is sent to the user and the procedure is done. In case the document is not valid, the money is refunded and the client has to check the questionnaire to see where it went wrong.
Back when we started working on WIDU Legal, it didn’t even had a name. Our clients went over a number of ideas before settling for WIDU Legal, as it pronunciation in spanish is easy and resembles the phrase “We Do Legal” in english.
After the name was picked, it came to our design team to build the look and feel of the whole project. For this, we had to work with the colors selected for the logo (designed by another company) and a simple word that matched what the client wanted to be the first thing people thought of when entering the website: Hipster.
With only this two premises, our designers started working on differents models and templates before constructing what would be the first (and only) wireframe of WIDU Legal. It was presented to the client in high fidelity, which loved it at first sight. The colors, the feeling of the page and the way the UX worked were enough for the client to give us a greenlight for the whole thing, and our design team started to build the whole screens of the webpage. As it was decided very early that the first wireframe was final, the development team could begin to work on how the things would work with enough time so that the project could be completed on time.
For both us and the client, WIDU legal is one of the greatest working experiences we’ve ever had. The client married our agile methodologies from day one, and even decided to implement some of them in their firm, as they believe worktimes can be reduced by doing so. In our weekly meetings and while writing the user stories, the client was receptive of our approach to their project, understood our timeframe and answered every question asked with detailed information, so that we were both on the same page and walked the road to the best iteration of WIDU Legal posible.
WIDU is fully online already, but will continuously grow and change. Both our team and the client work constantly to better understand the user’s neccesities , in order to expand the tools WIDU Legal has to offer. The third phase of the project is expansion to other countries and we are already working on it, not only by upgrading our catalogue of products, but also by learning about international laws and how are they different to those of the Venezuelan WIDU.
We hope to keep working together with WIDU and AraqueReyna in this and other future projects, and that our relationship stays as firm as it is now.
Find WIDÚ Legal at https://widulegal.com/
For inquiries about our development and design services, e-mail us at hola@turpialdev.com.
You can also visit us on the web: turpialdev.com or instagram, linkedin, facebook, twitter
