Axiom law - DIGITAL BUYER Experience
CASE STUDY
Platform
Web
PC
Mobile
AUDIENCE
Clients (looking for lawyers)
Lawyers
Business Ops
TEAMS
Talent Outreach
Product
R&D
Clients
RoleS
Research
UX/UI Designer
Feature Owner
THE CONTEXT
Axiom Law seeks to disrupt the legal experience, by inviting lawyers to abandon the law firm and giving them the ability to choose their own hours and engagements.
We have three user bases: Lawyers, also known as Talent who are using our platform to freelance, Clients who are seeking lawyers for their practices at a much lower rate than law firms, and Talent Outreach (also known as BizOps), who are Axiom employees that matchmake Talent with Clients.
The old user flow:
The Client comes to Axiomlaw.com
Client finds talent that they are interested in
Client selects a CTA saying, “More ”
CTA opens a lead capture form which asks the user to connect with Talent Outreach
Client does not fill out the form; click-through rate falls off a cliff
THE Problem
The click-through rate drops after clients press the “Inquire with Axiom” button on a lawyer’s card
When clients visit our site to look for lawyers, they seem intrigued enough by specific talent (lawyers) to hit the “Inquire with Axiom” button, however, clients are dropping off when the button opens up a lead form. How do we make sure that we aren’t losing clients and therefore engagements and potential revenue?
THE OPPORTUNITY
Could clients self-serve while browsing our site through a new digital experience?
A client who’s looking to connect to a lawyer has to be matchmade through the internal Axiom team, which could take days of back-and-forth contact. Research sessions with users are turning up words like, “spoon-fed” and “archaic.” Instead of asking the client to contact Axiom, could we introduce a new digital experience that allows our clients to look at available talent and self-serve while browsing our site?
RESEARCH & DEFINE
The numbers show that clients were clicking the lead capture form and dropping off. The original suggestion involved testing new language with A/B testing, but after some discussion with the technical PMs and VP of R&D, we decided that we should address the problem with a new concept called the Digital Buyer Experience.
For this project, it was obvious that a prototype would be necessary both to present to stakeholders for a greenlight, and to gauge the interest of our clients, who were notoriously not tech-savvy.
I spoke to partner teams to assemble a study: Talent Outreach was able to provide me the names of clients I could reach out to, Product helped me form the strategy on how this fits into Axiom’s business model, R&D helped me define the iterative steps of the prototype, and the Clients themselves took time out of their day to talk to me.
DISCOVERY
Since we were still in the discovery phase, in place of a technical spec, I wrote a validation case to guide our team through the discovery of a new feature. This entailed defining goals, non-goals, scenarios for the prototype, and usability testing for our clients and for our talent, as well as potential KPIs for any future product. This was used by PMs, designers, and stakeholders as a north star as we began our process of validating our assumptions.
VALIDATION CASE
For this feature, I also operated as the researcher. I wrote a script which included context, introductions for VP and me, and a list of questions with the goal of understanding the user’s relationship to Axiom, their pain points, needs, requests, and user journeys for the existing system. Although this was scripted, I conducted the surveys in a conversational manner, jumping around as the discussion unfolded with the client in a 1:1 virtual interview.
The interviews were being recorded, so while I was conducting the UR study, I was able to take some notes, but did the majority of my data synthesizing after the interview. I created an Excel sheet to record all the responses, making sure to include pull quotes in the client’s own language where possible. After this document was filled out, I highlighted recurring responses and sent it the stakeholder team for review. The answers I got from these UR sessions influenced and inspired the final Digital Buyer Experience we went on to create and the Clients’ responses gave me the ammo I needed to develop the MVP.
USER STUDY: SCRIPT & SYNTHESIS
UX WORK
Because of the complexity of having 3 user groups (Client, Talent, and BizOps), I created a swim-lane chart to illustrate when each person becomes relevant in the flow. There are four main buckets before the Client and the Talent begin working a paid engagement together: Discovery & Outreach, Lawyer Opt In, Conversation, Engagement Agreement, and Setup
USER FLOW
I also created a more detailed user flow, wherein I include call-outs for UI scenes and decision-tree moments. Like the above chart, it is broken down by swim lanes for Client, Talent, and BizOps.
Below is a video of a prototype I created to illustrate this flow. This video illustrates a client who’s interested in a specific lawyer (selects “more details”), signs in to access more data points (such as hourly rate and availability), sign-in flow, chooses to talk to the lawyer (selects “talk to lawyer”), fills out contact form (available times to chat and contract information), then shows the Client’s point of view when the Lawyer accepts the invitation to chat (email template), the Client and Lawyer chat to see if they’re a good fit, then the Client receives another email to continue with booking, which leads them to a new form where they can verify their engagement details, decide on engagement type and billing. This then is workshopped by Axiom’s internal team, BizOps / Talent Engagement, where they send over one last contract to the Client to initiate the entire engagement.
This is the deliverable I used to get sign-off from stakeholders (CEO, CPO, CMO); once it was approved, I worked with the TPM to break the screens down into requirements. For this particular design, we decided the MVP was just the part where the Client is able to reach out to the Lawyer. I also used this prototype to speak with the Clients from the UR study earlier in order to validate my design.
PROTOTYPE
This scene below is what the Client sees when they are not logged in. Note that the Location, Availability, and Rate are blurred out. There was a lot of discussion around upsell, specifically which elements to cover in order to entice the Client to sign up, and these three were the strongest contenders. In order to see more information or talk to the lawyer, the Client had to create an account.
KEY SCREENS
Once the Client has logged in, they can see the Location, Availability, and Rate information. At this point, we would expect that most users would choose Talk to Lawyer.
Upon selecting “Talk to Lawyer,” we provide the user with a couple of quick modals to gather information. Unlike previously, when we forced the Client to talk to Axiom before they could talk to the talent, this allows the Client to immediately start connecting with the lawyer. This addressed some of the concerns of the interviewed users, who felt the prior experiences seemed “spoonfed” and “archaic.”
There are multiple emails which are sent to the Client during this process to confirm that they’ve reached out, to confirm a conversation time with the lawyer, and to confirm engagement details. This image below is a mock-up of an email I created that is sent after the Client and Lawyer have connected and the engagement details have been confirmed. This is a Review Contract email, the final step before the Lawyer can start working for the Client in earnest.
Using the prototype and the screens I created above, I worked with junior designers to clean up the designs and ensure they align with any existing library of fonts or components. Once final UI comps were approved by stakeholders and myself, they were handed off to Engineers. Instead of hand-redlining these scenes, our developers were able to view our Sketch files to gather requirements.
I then worked closely with our engineers to ensure that their designs met my bar for visuals and interaction.
After all the work put into the prototypes, I was privileged to be able to follow up with some of the UR participants and ask them how they felt about the experience. They were overwhelmingly excited about the ability to initiate their own engagements, with BizOps only stepping in as the deal was closed.
hand-off
OUTCOME
We managed to pull in an extra $6.5 million in revenue within the first 2 months
When we put these modals up on Axiomlaw.com and allowed Clients to browse our talent as our MVP, we managed to pull in an extra $6.5 million in revenue within the first 2 months. This number validated a lot of assumptions about our work, and all of that success stemmed from listening to our customers. I was so privileged to be able to exist in this role as both an IC, a researcher, and a strategist.