UI/UX Designer
Enterprise Software
Redesign of a legacy platform with a fully functional product on a modernized platform with an optimized experience.
I had the opportunity to work for a client in the legal/debt collection industry. They serve more debt collection law firms than any other high-end legal debt collection software provider and have over 900 installations nationwide. I was brought onto this project as the UX/UI designer and we were tasked with redesigning their existing platform with a focus on helping enterprise firms complete more basic debt collection workflows, address critical pain points impacting customer productivity, and implement a modernized visual styling.
Identifying research objectives in the beginning helped us focus on the overall goal of the project and what we were trying to achieve with the client.
Understand research objectives
Capture existing functionality to ensure the redesign accounts for existing features.
Identify the good, Improve the bad
Identify what works well and what doesn’t with the existing experience.
Appeal to customers
Identify features and functionality that would make the platform appealing to enterprise customers.
Identity user personas
Identify personas to ensure the platform is designed to meet the needs of the client’s customers.
Explore the competition
Understand the competition to ensure the platform is the best option on the market.
Since we were unable to compare direct competitor interfaces. we instead sought to understand what the differences were at a high level. The SWOT framework created a structure for us to understand what the client needs to improve to gain the competitive edge. Below is a summary of our findings.
Strengths
Weaknesses
Opportunity
Threats
We also created a process map that depicted the start to finish flow of a collection file through the collections and legal process via the platform. It also shows the various personas with access to the system and their level of involvement.
The purpose of the document was to act as a reference artifact to communicate and understand system implications that design and database decisions could have during the design process.
We interviewed four different firms and they were selected to represent different sizes (from small to enterprise) and different legal spaces. Below are themes that we uncovered from the interviews.
Throughout our interviews, we noticed various users leveraging automation tools but wishing those tools have smarter system logic. Users also seemed to jump around quite a bit between UI systems. There was a desire for reduced manual processes and system-guided assistance throughout their daily tasks to make them faster, or at least appear that way.
Accompanying the prior theme, we noticed several areas where the same information was disparate across parts of the system, not updating in real time. Subjects pined for the system to communicate with them better, and educate them when needed.
Enhanced security came up often, particularly among firm admins. Admins desired to see more field-level permissions per persona, as well as individual persona screens for collectors, attorneys, and accounting.
The client was aware of the need to enhance the litigation experience for attorneys, this was also clear in the interviews. While testing the UX of the litigation experience, we saw a lot of jumping between screens and popups. A need for a more robust automation and utility from our pervious themes also surfaced during the interviews.
Below is a list of design principles that we created based on our findings from the process flow and user interviews.
Minimize the clicks
Adherence to current design standards, usability testing, and minimizing time spent on tasks.
Bring the system to life
Ensure harmony with usable feedback and factual updates in real time.
Satisfy the attorney
Laser focus on the prior themes and leveraging UX opportunities.
Personalized and secure
User centered design accounting for each persona’s goals while also ensuring security is water tight.
