Role
Product Designer
Year
Q3 2021 - Q1 2022
Team
Product Manager
Fullstack Engineers
Research Coach
Content Designers
Legal SME
Deliverables
Stakeholder interviews
Comparative analysis
Crazy 8s workshop
Journey maps
Wireframes
Prototypes
Assumption generation
Executive presentations
Walkthrough of the implemented feature!
CONTEXT
Wait, what exactly is this?
Ever seen a legal drama like ‘Better Call Saul’ or ‘Suits’?
Think scenes of suit-clad young paralegals sifting through files in a boardroom, mountains of legal boxes heaped all around. They’re performing a process called ‘Discovery’—a lengthy requirement for any legal case to track down relevant materials.
These days, there’s not only physical papers to sift through, but tons of digital material as well. The software solution for this is called eDiscovery—and any app storing member documentation has got to have it.
Discovery = stacks on stacks on stacks of files.
RESEARCH + PERSONA
Won't somebody think of the compliance admins?
As part of Mural's strategy to win Enterprise clients, I went where not many designers have been before—the world of security and compliance features.
One of the first things we heard from our customers and their admins was how happy they were to know we had a complete team dedicated to eDiscovery. That said, the bar for usability (even delight?!) was very, very low.
In a all practical sense, we knew that these people weren't going to be hanging out on the eDiscovery page all day for the fun of it. That didn't mean it had to be a low-balled experience either.
Our objective was for admins to proclaim that Mural provides the smoothest experience of all SaaS eDiscovery solutions.
Activities & outputs
"We don’t get a lot of well designed apps for this type of work. Really excited to hear that Mural is paying this much attention to our needs and experience."
—A happy customer contact
A handy chart of what parts of the eDiscovery process Mural can support natively.
The feature was divided into two main JTBDs: Search + collect and Export.
COLLABORATIVE EXPLORATIONS
When designing for a niche, don't go it alone
The good news was, our end user fell into a very definable niche.
However, it was hard to get first-hand intel on them. Given the time of year (Q4), our user research team told us that compliance admins and other legal types would be tough to recruit for testing.
We'd have to get scrappy and find some alternative sources.
Enter our Mural legal SME, the Product and Privacy Counsel. With a 17-year law career, she offered us invaluable design feedback and insights on the terminology and mental model of our user.
Along with our Counsel, I brought the engineering team and product manager into the design process by facilitating a design studio session (Crazy 8s) and collaborating on user journey maps.
These team exercises helped us to align on highly technical flows before getting into design and generate diverse ideas about how to approach those flows.
Activities & outputs
Pulling together the main JTBD and the user flows to identify any gaps, what needs to be surfaced in the UI, and align on expectations. (This is essential for any project before getting into wires!)
Crazy 8’s design studio: each team member had 8 minutes to come up with sketches based on the user flows. We then voted on the top ideas. I then explored those concepts in the designs.
USER FLOWS + WIREFRAME ITERATIONS
Hold up. We're a digital whiteboarding company, not an eDiscovery product.
Now that we’d taken a look at what other products provided for eDiscovery and our own limitations (technical and procedural), it was quickly becoming apparent that the UI should be constrained to focus on the most essential needs—at least for the beta launch.
Although we came up with a lot of great ideas in our exploratory design studios, it was time to align on what the UI would realistically leverage:
Timely communication to the Compliance Admin, inside and outside the app
Job progress tracking including statuses
Supporting Search as a ‘narrowing’ activity
DESIGN ITERATIONS + TESTING
What got in the way and how we got around it
Lack of patterns
Problem: The feature consisted of two tabs with tables and a form for creating searches–common UI for admin pages, but lacking in our system at the time.
Fix: I relied on feedback from other Enterprise designers and the Design Systems Team’s guidance so that we could scale the page for future design system implementation and contribute repeatable patterns for upcoming admin features.
Error feedback
Problem: What backend processing errors should be surfaced to the users, and where?
Fix: We decided to err on less notifications, as most all backend errors would be resolved by our team. Users would only be notified if their search or export could not be completed.
Statuses
Problem: Depending on the amount of content identified in the search, the backend content collection and export could take hours or even a full day to complete.
Job status updates in the UI and outside of it were essential, but we weren’t able to support live progress indicators, and had to rely on the user refreshing or returning to the page for updates.
Fix: Display the updates we could accurately disclose, such as the number of pieces of content made ready for export. Also, email notifications for key status updates, such as job completion and failure
Activities & outputs
Iterations of options for the Search Creation form presented for design critique. The Search Creation form could be divided into two steps either by sectioning it out on one page, or over two pages. As the second part was optional, we ended up hiding the bottom form in an expandable panel.
METRICS PLANNING
One more thing
In addition to the design handoff and QA activities, I wanted to make sure that we kept tabs on certain metrics pertinent to the user experience.
While the HEART framework is often used for B2C products, I still like using to get very technical B2B teams thinking about the human factor.
Not surprisingly, Task Success was the most populated area (see chart below).
We also made a point to note metrics for Happiness—we don’t want our users to have a horrible time after all.
Engagement, Adoption, and Retention were deemed less necessary as the feature is a required tool for Compliance Admins.
Activities & outputs
Collaborated with PM and engineers to come up with HEART metrics for beta launch and beyond.
REFLECTIONS
Post Beta launch
What we learned from customers in Beta:
As of June 2023, 10 out of 11 eDiscovery beta customers are using the UI solution. Just one continues to use API.
Customers expressed satisfaction in conversations with the CS team
Continued to express hopes for realtime progress updates
What I learned from this project:
Focus on the essentials
Given the timeline, scope, and technical intricacies, I had to put a lot of thought into what would be useful to surface in the UI. There was a fine line between informing and overwhelming users.
Speak your users’ language—even if its strange to you at first
Especially when they are in a hyper-precise role such as law.
Get scrappy
While testing with your persona is always desirable, it can be tough in the Enterprise Admin world. Bring in Subject Matter Experts, people in tangential roles, and internal colleagues who work closely with customers to fill in the gaps.