Speakers:
·
Stuart Barr, HighQ
·
Andrew Baker, Seyfarth Shaw
·
Tom Baldwin, Reed Smith
·
Patrick DiDomenico, Ogletree Deakins
These are my notes on an interesting session that talked about and in some cases
showed some advance designs for law firm intranets and extranets.
Stuart Barr
[I had to miss the first few minutes of this presentation. One notable
tweet on the subject from Rebecca Gebhardt said "UX is not UI. It is a
user's perception of the product. Indeed in many ways it IS the product.].
The way people use things is changing. Desktop screens are only the
start.
Macs, Androids and the like are changing the way people perceive
design. Devices are exposing people to ways of interacting with technology that
are more advanced. People have a better technology experience at home than at
work.
IT can be easy, powerful and simple (Dion Hinchliffe).
Good design is now a key aspect of technology. We're trying to do more
complex things with technology, but also need to keep it simple to use.
Aspects of the user experience may or may not be in the designer's
control.
Make things simple by "bringing order to complexity." Don't
add one more button. And don't design for the "edge cases."
An iterative design process is really key. See what mistakes users
make and design to avoid those. Design combines science and art.
Design matters for adoption and engagement. Internally design helps
staff efficiency and productivity, helping staff have nice experiences and do
their jobs more quickly. Client expectations are getting higher.
Tom Baldwin
He's showing before and after of design. He recognizes that no one on
his team had the proper skills, and therefore brought in a design expert.
He's moving to design standards based on the designer's work.
About a quarter of Reed Smith work is on a fixed fee basis, so
accurate matter profile was critical. They wanted to get more completed matter
profiles, and also increase ease of use. They also put in some gamification,
which surprisingly turned out to motivate partners.
Their old matter profile system didn't allow for search of other
matters, only allowed for one area of law, and had a very long form you had to
scroll through.
The new one had a tabbed view showing people the process.
The "confidential matter" was a critical question that was
often not answered before because it was at the end.
The questionnaire form breaks down questions by area and showed
percentage complete. Questions were presented in one frame. Save and spellcheck
options were not buried at the bottom of the form.
A visual representation of completeness was important.
He listed "Leading matter profilers" on the landing page of
the matter portal.
This led him to think about other areas where a leaderboard approach
might help.
They'll have a rollup score for things that reflect good corporate
citizenship.
Tom indicated at the end that they are looking into programs like
badgeville to further leverage attorneys' competitive nature, and will be
integrating this with their enterprise social networks.
Andrew Baker
Their firm intranet has soothing colors, light blues and the like.
They went with usage patterns in thinking about the most important
things. Every page has a way to provide feedback.
They ran a card-sorting exercise and met with people from every
department and office, asking them to sort the cards representing 77 different
pieces of content into piles that made sense.
Before they built anything, they created wireframes; these allowed to
adjust the approach as they talked with attorneys and staff.
They used the "Balsamiq" tool for wireframing. It saved them
a lot of time.
Looking back, Andrew feels that the graphics were a little too much,
and that they also had a little bit too much information on each page. He's not
sure about the value of the intranet.
[Ed--to give some sense of the visuals, I have to note that the
Seyfarth intranet home page was much more content-heavy than the other two
demonstrated.]
They've more recently rolled out a client extranet
"SeyfarthLink."
They first tried to figure out how clients used the previous extranet.
The clients are very focused on portfolio management or portfolio centricity.
They created matter sites, client sites, and portfolio sites. Content can be
collected and shared.
They are sharing live financial data on the client extranets.
He recommends Stephen Few's book on Information Dashboard Design.
Team pages can be really important, adding a human touch that
encourages visitors to trust the site.
They didn't start with mobile, and think it may be difficult to go
back and make it work on mobile.
A lot of the Seyfarth work has been client-facing. That has a very
different value proposition.
Patrick
DiDomenico
He's talking about SharePoint intranet evolution.
Back before structured sites, everything had to be right on the home
page. They had a traditional intranet home page that had dozens and dozens of
links and small font.
Neuroscientists from Princeton have established that clutter makes
people anxious.
Focus is very important for getting your point across. Don't design so
the user is confronted with a wall of words.
The new "OD Connect" has a persistent banner with key search
and some buttons.
A news and announcements section is targeted to your own office and
practice group. It only shows the selected article but conveys the headlines of
the other.
A dashboard shows recent matters and also a financials preview.
He wanted to make it "magnetic," give people a motivation to
come to the intranet.
OD Connect has customized view for secretaries allowing them quick
access to their lawyers' matters and financials.
Associate view shows associate bonus targets, calculated for the
individual. You can work with documents from the portal. A news tab shows news
about OD and about its competitors.
Users can customize one of six feeds from a dropdown.
He is always asking, "What can we take away from the screen to
let people focus?"
OD Connect allows people to select specific top-left navigation.
If you go too far away from what people are used to, they may get
frustrated.
The "Find It" button opens a navigation menu on hover-over.
The wins have been the Find IT button, search, and customized buttons.
How people feel about your brand is important. He wanted to make
people feel connected to it.
The theme of pre-rollout communications was "making your life
easier." They distributed nail puzzles and matchbooks.
When they can, they put buttons at top and bottom of the form.
Expectations have risen, designing for mobile is critical, and we need
to simplify our tool.
[Ed.--I really liked the clean look and feel of OD Connect, and also
the features that were customized to particular types of users like
secretaries].
Design is even more important for client-facing work. It's appropriate
to use design consultants in this type of work, because it doesn't rise to the
level of an FTE.
It is important to have client-facing extranets have a consistent look
and feel with other online properties.
Lawyers may not know what cognitive overload is. But if you relate
some common consumer solutions to their problems, and show them visually, the
leaders can understand the need better. Don't try to explain, show. Use
Balsamiq to focus them on what's important and to move them away from what's
not important. Running too much by higher ups can paralyze the process.
The project took about thirteen months but would have taken less if
they hadn't been interrupted in the middle. He used PLA and Joshua Fireman, as
well as a design/advertising firm.
