SaaS web app

The problem

Everyone today wishes we could have a super-duper-ultra-mega-app that encompasses everything that we need to perform our jobs. (A remnant of older days when we didn’t need to have a thousand apps and logins and passwords and stuff in general maybe?)

It’s the dream. But, for now, that’s it, a dream. There is not, nor I envision there will be any soon, a one app/software that does it all – Google, notion or asana might be on their way, but far from reaching the destination.

The assignment

Considering this scenario, I wanted to understand how else I could help lawyers achieve more, and do more, enhancing their productivity at work. They should be able to focus on the task at hand rather than fighting with their tools. To accomplish this, I followed some steps:

The understanding of the problem

I had to first understand what were the main current issues, design a solution, test this solution and make changes whenever necessary (as a result from these tests) and then think about launching. All this was to be done in the loooong time span of nine days. Nine crazy-filled days.

So, I reached out to young lawyers working as in-house counsels and was able to lenghtily interview 10 of them (but they swore it was not boring!). In talking to them, I gathered that half think they received too many emails and chat messages and that legal software, if existent, were archaic and not user-friendly. In addition to that, 60% mentioned being hard to find company’s documents and information spread all over different folders, clouds and spreadsheets.

From this process I gathered that corporate in-house lawyers feel frustrated about losing a lot of time to find and give key information about the company. They needed to have an easy way to access and give away such information but they face an unorganized internal system and many sources of information.

The who (not the band)

To help in understanding how to solve these issues, three different personas were created: a primary (a senior lawyer that needed easy access to essential information but faced a lot of different sources), a secondary (junior lawyer wishing to have a less crowded inbox and keeps having to give out key company information to other people all day) and a tertiary one (a person from another department than the legal one, that needs to have easy access to the company’s documents and info but faces a very disorganized system).

The prototype

In order to help these people, I thought of a solution in the form of a prototype desktop web app that has the role of a single source of truth. You can check it below:

Prototype by me!

The design decisions

To create this SaaS web app, some design decisions were made and had to be kept in mind whilst building the prototype:

The style

To convey a more formal message, shades of blue and green were used, along with a shade of red for the call-to-action buttons, to get the users’ attention. Also, as a complement, some shades of gray were used.

The prioritization

Since a lot opf features were possible in this SaaS model, I had to prioritize some of them – it’s better to construct it bit by bit and do it awesomely than do it all very poorly. A mix of MoSCoW and RICE methods was used (the RICE without assigning numeric scores).

In the end, I got the following:

The iterations

As a result of these methods, this is what we wound up with:

i. quick and easy view and download of documents
ii. documents are organized all in one place and easy to find
iii. easier access to other branches’ information without having to depend on other people
iv. people outside the legal department can access the information and download the documents, but not replace them

To achieve the final result, some trial and error happened. In a first brainstorming, a couple of ideas popped up. Not all were pleasing to the users, as shown here:

The results of the iteractions

In the end, after tests and iterations, a card system was better accepted by the users. They thought it more visual, organized and easier to see the content:

And even in the high fidelity prototype, some changes had to be made after listening to the users. The first choice of a color scheme was not well accepted due to low contrast. Also, having both logos (the SaaS’ and the client’s) both big caused confusion.

The validation

After paying attention to the users’ tests, and improving the ideas, and improving them again, these are some of the results of connecting all these dots:

and

After all the testing, the first impressions mirrored an interesting market reaction of a product like that: users commented on being very interested in having a solution of this sort and Despite being one more tool, it seems simple enough and it has the potential to save a lot time for the counsels to focus on tasks that demand more intelectually – thus resulting in less manual work.

The future

Already aiming for improvement for the users, here is a roadmap of some features that could be implemented after launch: