Finished version of the Vision Scheduling form.

Modernizing Legal Tech

An enterprise application to convert client’s email requests into scheduled jobs.


Overview

Veritext is the top national agency for legal services. Vision is their enterprise application that lets their schedulers add, manage, and fulfill jobs.

Schedulers are tasked with keeping job information accurate while also maintaining close relationships with law firms to ensure customer satisfaction. However, the current data management process is tedious and inefficient, diverting valuable time away from building and maintaining these relationships.

Business Problems

Long turnaround time for jobs costs money.

Duplicate data records costs time.

Undocumented business rules.

Success Metrics

Increase the number of scheduled jobs.

Reduce duplicate data records.

User Problems

At the time of my onboarding to the project, there was prior research done. Reviewing this research while collaborating with the PO led our team to these insights on the user problem:

  1. Users were finding workarounds in the application because they did not know the business rules.
  2. Submitting the information was difficult because navigating the form was confusing, essential information was unclear, and allowed values were ambiguous.

User Problem 1: Undefined Business Rules

Defining the rules was not my role nor was it to train the schedulers on the business rules. The goal was to facilitate an understanding of the rules across the product, development, and design teams. A common understanding would help navigate us towards a common product vision.

Approach

Object diagrams and process flows to drive alignment.

As a part of the design process, we had in-depth reviews of the object diagrams and process flows for each user task. These reviews turned out to be very fruitful, as we often found misalignment on the architecture.

Outcome

The in-depth reviews culminated in the form of the implementation. But incremental progress had to be made to reach the final solution. In this case, we leveraged the diagrams and flows to inform our decisions. Below are examples of some visuals we utilized:


User Problem 2: Form Navigation

New schedulers stated they had trouble finding information on the form, while experienced schedulers learned to become familiar with the form information. This was an indication that onboarding new employees would be costly, as the learning curve would cost time and money.

Entry of job information was not a linear process and schedulers needed a way to jump between information.

Existing UI and its form in entirety.

Approach

Single-page form with logical grouping of information and a way of navigating between sections.

We were able to propose a logical grouping and ordering of information based on the object diagram and process flows. In speaking with subject matter experts, there were commonalities for the process of intaking information. An understanding of these commonalities and the conditional fields informed how we would organize the information.

We knew we wanted a single-page form because the data entry process was not linear. Using a wizard was considered but was quickly determined to not be the most efficient approach. We focused on the logical grouping to give schedulers a way to jump between information.

Final Solution

With constant collaboration with the PO, were landed on a logical grouping for the information. Once this grouping was decided, we decided to use anchor links as the method of allowing users to jump around on the page.


User Problem 3: Form Validation

The existing UI lacked clear form validation patterns and concise messaging to help schedulers identify and resolve errors. Schedulers could not determine whether the information entered was a duplicate, invalid, or acceptable record.

While evaluating the existing UI, we also found that the application had inconsistent and ambiguous messaging.

Approach

Error prevention methods with clear and consistent content guidelines.

We worked with the PO to identify required fields, types of validations, and error resolution methods. Identifying these areas laid the foundation for the error prevention methods. We understood that error resolution should be mutually beneficial for users and the business goals.

  • For users, identifying the errors should be clear while the resolution should be instructive and concise.
  • For the business, error prevention would make the scheduling process more efficient while maintaining “cleaner” data records.

Final Solution

The delivered designs included inline field validations with error helper text that is representative of the proposed content guidelines. For fields with conditional rules and structured data, we used success and error icons to clearly communicate the validation status.


Impact

I rolled off the project before the application was released. Usability testing did yield positive results, with schedulers indicating the following ratings:

Form navigation: 4.5/5

Clarity of errors and resolution: 4.4/5

Next Steps

I handed off the project to another designer, as I onboarded to the client’s customer-facing platform. The plan for this application was to wrap up more features and create a rollout plan for beta users. Eventually, the client would shutdown the legacy application and have all users use the next gen application.