Rocket Matter
Defining the design strategy for a legal practice management tool's first tablet app
Sitemotif Client: Rocket Matter
Role: UX Designer & Research Lead
2014
The Project
Rocket Matter, a legal practice management software company, brought me in as a UX consultant to help create their first tablet app. They already had a successful web application and an iPhone app, but both were becoming dated, and users complained they were often unintuitive. Through upfront research and iteration, I delivered actionable insights and design improvements for the product refresh.
The Role
They wanted recommendations for improving the experience and a fresh approach for the tablet that could carry over to mobile and desktop. They had no UX or design resources, so I provided both research and design. I worked with the Head of Development, product managers and the customer support manager to set the strategy, then with their front-end developers and visual designers on execution.
Setting The Strategy
I started with two questions the research needed to answer:
What do users like and dislike about the current desktop and mobile applications?
How does the product fit into an attorney's ecosystem, and are any needs being missed?
To answer them, I used several sources:
Public forums, blog posts and software review sites about Rocket Matter and its competitors.
Interviews with customer support reps, plus a review of call logs.
NPS feedback and comments.
Account cancellation survey responses.
Interviews with attorneys who did and didn't use the software.
Interviews with stakeholders about the company and its goals.
A competitive analysis of the top three vendors.
Online usage metrics.
I focused on the primary user, the solo attorney.
“There are about 1.2 million attorneys in the US, with about 800,000 practicing. Most of those are in companies with 10 people or less. Our primary client is the solo attorney.”
What I Learned
Insight 1. The word "unintuitive" appeared everywhere. Users liked the software and its core functionality, but they struggled to navigate and learn it.
Insight 2. Attorneys had a hard time getting a high-level overview of their practice. Rocket Matter was unusual in being matter-centric instead of client-centric, but the structure required a lot of digging.
Design Principles
The research gave me five prioritized principles to guide the work and future recommendations:
Design aesthetics: update the visual design.
Information organization: restructure to avoid needless digging and make movement easy.
Intuitive interactions: rely on common web patterns and simpler interactions.
Interface efficiencies: reduce complexity with good defaults and shortcuts.
Holistic lifecycle: make sure the product fits into the attorney's ecosystem across the stages of a case.
Analysis and Design
The research set clear goals: make the product more consistent, simplify the navigation flow, and add a practice dashboard for a better overview of the user's work. In the existing app, drilling into a case replaced the top-level navigation with matter-specific navigation. I analyzed the desktop and iPhone apps, competitors and flows to make the structure more approachable and keep the top-level navigation in place.
Once the navigation was set, I worked page by page. I went through several rounds of sketching and focused on the details of the micro-interactions, so the nuances of use felt intuitive and functional. For each page, I worked through the patterns and states of every element.
When the direction felt right, I ported the designs into a rough Axure prototype for usability testing. Flow was a known problem, so I wanted the new designs to pass an interactive test before development.
The Opportunity
During the studies, I found a missed opportunity in time tracking.
“Many days I’d work a long day, working on 5-10 clients (all different matters) and having virtually nothing to show for it on a timesheet. That feeling is one of the worst you can have, short of screwing up professionally.”
Attorneys mostly tracked time after the fact, because they had to handle interruptions as they came. Time often got entered all at once at the end of the day, so interruptions and chunks of billable time went unrecorded, which meant lost revenue. I rethought how time tracking worked and designed a new multi-function timer.
“I really like the multiple timer function, it makes timekeeping more efficient.”
What I Delivered
I delivered the final designs plus a strategy deck covering the principles, the research and recommendations for future improvements. Implementation and release was managed by the development team at Rocket Matter.
