Lead Viewer
Project Background
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The Law Superstore is a website that provides users with law firms to deal with their legal needs. Users will answer a short set of questions and are then matched with four legal service providers qualified to deal with their needs.
One of the main issues was most of our partners were not reporting the conversion of these leads. As so few of our partners were reporting conversion, it was challenging to analyse lead quality and the impact any changes have to the site. The business set one of its objectives as to improving lead reporting. So I decided to investigate why reporting was so low and how to improve the overall experience of the lead viewer.
My Role
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As the only UX Designer working on this project I was tasked with identifying the issues with the current lead viewer and creating a new design that would help better cater to legal professionals. This project was created in UXPin and from research to prototype took roughly 3 months.
What I Did
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Plan and Conduct user interviews and Research
Facilitate Cross Functional Team workshops
Create Lo-fi Designs
Explore new page atheistic
Create Prototypes (UXpin)
Testing
Research
Interviews
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At the beginning of this project I interviewed a number of law firms who were currently using our system. Prior to this most information about these users came from sales and were often anecdotal. After creating a research plan I was ready to go and from these interviews three key frustrations emerged –
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Smaller firms wanted better tracking features integrated into the system, such as notes and reminders.
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With multiple users in the same office leads were occasionally being accidently marked as acknowledged and ignored.
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Most users did not know the had the option to mark the status of leads within our system.
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Larger firms were more likely to use external tracking software
The interviews brought up a lot of new information about our users and especially highlighted the difference between law firms of different sizes. These firms could be one person operations or firms with hundreds of members of staff. The larger firms were less likely to engage with improved tracking as they had their own internal software to do this and an API/webhook would be better suited for them. At this point I created four personas to convey to the business the different needs of users and showcase how different they can be.
User Observations
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I still didn’t feel like I had the full picture, so to get a better understanding of how users interact with the page, I utilised mouse flow which presented heat map of the page and had hundreds of recordings of users interacting with this page. There were three common issues that I observed.
Users would most often scroll to the bottom of the page to get the lead contact information first.
Users would often highlight and copy contact information, normally having to try more than once
To view multiple leads, users would have to navigate back to the master list of leads to get to the next lead.
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These behaviours started to explain why users were not engaging with the conversion reporting drop-down which was located at the top of the page. The hierarchy of the page did not reflect our user’s needs with information feeling very fragmented. What quickly emerged was when users had to deal with more than one lead, they would need to select the lead from a master list, view the lead and then go back to the master list to select a new lead.
Defining the Problem
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From the research there were three clear problems with the current page. The page hierarchy did not reflect how users behaved, with information scattered across the page. Conversion reporting was difficult and the language used was confusing, not reflecting industry terminology. The page did not accommodate user behaviour, such as copying information or navigating easily through leads.
I decided the three main areas of focus should be;
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Easier conversion Reporting – Making the process simple and intuitive.
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Information Architecture Restructure – Prioritising the most relevant information.
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Functionality updates – Adding functionality based on user behaviour.
Ideation
Wireframing​
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I had several ideas from my research, and I created several wireframes to encapsulate them early. In the early stages of design, I allow myself to design without restrictions, as I find this helps fully explore the problem. At this point, I also spoke to the developer and front end designer working on the project to assess feasibility. Two larger-scale ideas had to be cut due to resource availability but were centred around an activity tracker and changing the way we present the user's questions and answers.
I started by reviewing the information on the current page and understanding why it was there. I then grouped this information into three key areas Lead Contact Information, Lead Management Information and Case information. I then began to play with the overall layout of these three groups and settled on a design that would best suit the user’s needs.
Design
Early Prototype​
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I created a rough prototype to showcase the concept to the cross functional team. This early prototype showcase the revised layout, new conversion reporting buttons and easier navigation. I created several leads to navigate through in order to give a clear understanding of what a “typical session would look like”.
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I wasn’t particularly happy with the way the buttons dominated the page and this was a sentiment that was echoed by the team. The next lead button would reflect whatever search criteria the user had selected, defaulting to new leads in chronological order if nothing had been selected. The team were happy with the changes that had been made but felt the navigation buttons were off. I went back to design an alternative.
Refinement
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I did really struggle to come up with a new concept for the navigation buttons but then I started to think about what the core objectives of this redesign were. If we were trying to encourage conversion then allowing users to change the next lead type on the page would allow them to go through all of their new leads and then go onto their in progress leads without ever having to go back to the main lead manager page.
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This meant a user could go through a number of different leads in whatever order suited them best but it felt important that they should be able to navigate back or at least access previously viewed leads. At this point I added a lead history tab that would allow users to easily navigate back through previous leads quickly.
Current Status
Lastly some basic UI changes were implemented to make the page neater and to group the question and answers together in the case information section. I also added a link to the pricing section for this page, which is helpful for newer users who often change their pricing to become more competitive.
This project is still in development and is awaiting some minor elements from graphics to replace the placeholder elements that have been used.
It will be initially trailed on a selected panel of users, who will be asked for their feedback on the new design. If no changes are required it will be released to all of our users, with the opportunity to give feedback. From this point onwards we will be continue to monitor conversion reporting, as well as monitoring how they use the new features.