Challenge
CT’s core customers are legal professionals and paralegals working in corporate legal departments and law firms who manage the enormous bulk of documentation required for corporations to be in legal and regulatory compliance with corporate transactions, corporate records, and jurisdictional and securities compliance. This body of complex data requires multiple periodic filing updates, frequently across jurisdictions. Since form-based work was common across many core users, supporting the tasks around forms became the center focus of the redesign. CT’s previous offerings focused on providing services to perform this work for the customer, but they wanted to move to a self-service model. Therefore, the team’s research focused on understanding the roles, actions and motivations of the corporate and legal professionals who contribute to and accomplish the work surrounding the forms.
Because the new product would need to support users in various industries, and at different levels and intensities, it was vital the design be flexible enough to accommodate most variations of work flow.
Additionally, the company sought to relocate phone support to web-based support. To meet these needs, the team looked to answer the following:
- What is the users’ common pattern of work across multiple form types?
- Can CT design a user experience architecture that works for all types of documents?
- How can CT customers be encouraged to use web-enabled self-service?
“We’ve experienced increased usage month over month even during the economic downturn. Its value is recognized.”
–Andrea Thomas, Senior Product Manager CT
The Process
InContext and CT formed a hybrid team with the intent of providing multiple CT members with on-the-job instruction and focused coaching in Contextual Design. The team performed 30 customer interviews and interpretations. This rich user data was analyzed with InContext’s affinity diagram and work models, capturing all of the key aspects of the work, and producing a comprehensive design which was then tested iteratively with users through paper prototyping.
Delivering Results
Grown from direct user data, all designs are validated results to work across document and user types.
Specifically, the core structure of information architecture and the additional systemic sets of activities to be supported results directly from designs based on user centered data. New product characteristics include:
- Enhanced workflow and guided assistance, enabling direct action
- Smart automation, reducing needless, tedious work
- Support for tasks according to the user’s preferred work flow
- Flexible views of data allowing users to meet their changing needs