Situation: A legal services firm needed to revamp how they collect and distribute depositions, namely to incorporate new efficiency-generating business processes and to move from an aging Windows 95-based system to a flexible web-based system.
Task: Spend a week embedded with the firm at their New York City headquarters in order to understand the current business process challenges and transform those findings into a user experience architecture for a new web-based system.
Action: After immersing myself with stakeholders both on-site and through teleconferences, I conceptualized a web application for scheduling and processing court reports that would replace an outdated Windows-based application. Since the world of court reporting was entirely new to me, I created numerous diagrams to help me understand the various workflows involved. Two such diagrams—one showing the current process and one showing the future process—are shown below.
After gaining a basic understanding of the court reporting business, I sketched out dozens of wireframe ideas using pen-and-paper, Adobe Illustrator, and iRise (per the client’s request). A high-fidelity demo showed how numerous key tasks would be carried out.
Result:
The result is an application that is organized in a manner that matches the mental model of users. After spending time with stakeholders, it became clear that their work was very “job-centric” (a “job” is a single deposition for which a court report would be gathered). Whereas the user experience of the system being replaced was based around the backend database structure, the new application’s user experience puts the job at the center of the various workflows and gives users quick access to all things job-related from a single entry point.
The new application also takes advantage of modern web principles and innovative interaction design. For example, the login/landing page (shown below) features a low barrier-to-entry form that lets customers request a service without having to first login.
The homepage dashboard (shown below) features a data-rich interactive calendar as well as an accordion containing panels of pertinent information.
Finally, on the page where users of the system assign various resources to work on jobs, important information is shown clearly and obviously, with a slideout panel similar to that used by Twitter containing additional information about each resource.
A sitemap for the new application is shown below—the long column of pages near the center of the image reflect the new job-centric structure of the application.
Tools used on this project include pen-and-paper, Microsoft Visio, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop, and iRise.
