ABC Legal User Research and Visual Design Kickstart

Roles: User Experience, Visual Design

Limina

ABC Legal came to Limina to put together redesign concepts for their app. To put it simply, they wanted to look more modern and “sexier” — think something like Uber but for process servers.

At first, the ABC Legal team only wanted a short engagement to focus on a refresh of their app’s look and feel. And while this remained their primary goal, the Limina team convinced them to add on a user research component to help lay the foundations for a better, more useful product down the road.

The Team

The Limina team working on the ABC Legal project had seven total team members:

• two partner/principals who oversaw the engagement

• a project manager

• a senior UX strategist who ran the research effort

• a design lead who oversaw the design effort

• two senior ux designers

For this engagement, I participated in the user research phase activities and deliverables, and also lead the visual design effort for the “design kick start” phase.

Understanding the Users

While the ABC Legal team often utilized user feedback for enhancements, they did not have enough context to understand their users from a behavioral perspective, nor did they maintain it in a repository for ongoing use and prioritization.

To kick off the project, our team helped ABC Legal identify users to speak to from across the U.S., spanning age ranges and time working with ABC Legal. In the end, we conducted 1-hour phone interviews with a final tally of 13 users. I helped conduct or take notes for many of the interviews. As interviews were completed, the data was entered and often quickly synthesized in our Airtable repository. Coding and tagging the data points from our generative research in a database tool, like Airtable, meant that our down-the-road deliverables for user segmentation were quicker and easier to pull together.

In addition to the repository as a whole being handed over, we delivered a final presentation of our research process, findings, and recommendations. These findings and recommendations were expansive, beyond just the app, and provided valuable insights for ABC Legal’s overall business.

User Segmentation

Our team generated the following user segmentation deliverables from the generative research, which were also included as part of the final research presentation:

• personas to segment the users (3 major, and 1 minor)

• a behavior model to map out behaviors to see areas of convergence and divergence

• a journey map to see how users flow through the process of serving

This was the first project where deliverables I had designed in Figma for reuse on Limina’s projects were tested. The freelance designer we brought on as the second ux designer on this project was able to easily create polished end products without much guidance from other team members.

Setting Design Direction with Style Tiles

Once the user research phase was well underway and those findings could be used to influence the visual design “kick start” portion of the engagement, style tile creation began. I helped guide our freelance designer through the process, since she was new to style tiles. I helped her figure out what design elements would make most sense to include in order to give the ABC Legal team a good sense of what each design direction could look like applied to common UI elements.

ABC Legal wanted their app to be modern and “sexier.” The Limina team also noted that the app’s overall design was not at all branded. We decided to provide two style tile directions for round one; one by me and one by our freelancer. While each tile gave a different flavor, they both explored a more branded approach to the app’s design.

We lead the ABC Legal team through three rounds of review: the initial review, round two based on feedback, and a third to see the final product. During the second round, they asked for a light and dark mode exploration. While they ultimately made the decision to only provide dark mode for now, the style tile exploration has given them some food for thought for future iterations of the app. As is usually the case, the final direction ended up being a combination of elements across the style tiles.

Concept Mockup and Prototyping

With the final direction chosen from the style tile phase, I was tasked with taking the look and feel and applying it to a key screen. And thanks to Figma, inevitably it felt like more than just one screen. I delivered a mini prototype to help provide a comprehensive view of what the design direction could look like applied to different components that might be viewed across the app.

The Results

ABC Legal’s team is small, lean, and eager. They are used to building fast and wanted to immediately take the design styles and apply it to their app. Thus, it was also hard to keep the team focused on clear feedback for a set number of revision rounds for the style tiles and concept mockup. In some ways, the scope crept or an additional revision was added, but we were able to successfully communicate the bounds of this initial project and keep it on time and in budget.

In the end, ABC Legal was very happy with the research findings and the design direction. While research was a hard sell initially, after the final presentation, they were pleasantly surprised with the user insights that went beyond the digital interface.

Today, the visual design direction set forth in this project can be seen in the recent updates made to the app, available in the Apple and Google Play stores.