OVERVIEW
‘Ask a Lawyer’ is a Q&A section of the Lawyers.com where users can post questions about their legal issue for lawyers to answer. It receives over 100,000 visitors per month but only a fraction of those users were posting questions and converting into leads for our legal clients (lawyers and law firms). It needed a major design upgrade from it’s 90s HTML vibe and poor user experience design which was causing high bounce rate which in effect was lowering lawyer retention and slowing the growth. This use case covers how my team and I redesigned the entire user experience of the website to increase the question submissions, increase conversion rate and lawyer retention.
You can navigate to specific parts of this redesign here:
About Lawyers.com
Lawyers.com provides accurate and reliable profiles of more than one million attorneys and law firms worldwide to help consumers find high-quality legal representation. We also provide a wealth of useful information to help the public understand the law and give them the tools to make informed personal legal choices. Through educational and engaging content, we inform readers and prepare them to go through various legal processes.
MY ROLE
As product owner for this project I performed and gathered research data, created and managed it’s roadmap, wrote the user stories, created the user experience wireframes and prototypes, prepared requirements, owned the product in daily standups, and coordinated functional team of engineers, QA, and UI designer. After the product launch I also kept track of it’s performance and metrics for necessary optimizations.
To drive this process I created click-through wireframe prototypes and coordinated with our ex VP of Product Manage on a weekly basis to discuss and confirm how designed features should fit together. Upon finalizing the UX side I collaborated with our UI designer to create a fresh and modern looking visuals for the site.
SOLUTION
We focused on design experiences that would address intents of different types of users and their online behavior. Some users may want to post a question, so in this case we had to make the form intuitive, efficient, and less time consuming as possible. Since the questions are distributed to our legal clients, we also reformatted the question form so that users provide the right kind of information to get better quality answers. Some users may be browsing the Q&As related to their personal case, and we made it easier to contact the lawyers if they found their answer helpful. For this scenario, we enhanced our algorithms and widgets to make it convenient and easy for the users to find the best and right information that they are looking for. We iteratively presented and validated the features which evolved based on users’ feedback and research findings.
RESULT
With the redesign of the site we saw the duration of user engagement from 1 minute to 3.5 minutes. With reformatted question form the lawyers were able to provide better answers which increased their prospect of converting those leads into clients. This better quality leads increased lawyers retention rate. Moreover, the lawyers got more direct leads from Q&As pages since now their contact information is shown if they answer questions. This also encouraged other lawyers to answer the questions posted from the site. In conclusion, the redesign helped to connect more users with lawyers which benefited both parties in the end.
GOALS
Bring major design upgrade from it’s 90s HTML vibe to somethings that’s fresh and modern looking.
Enhance overall user experience
Increase lead conversion
Increase lawyer retention through high-quality leads
Increase user engagement
Decrease bounce rate
GOALS
Make more users form and submit better questions to get better answer
Increase conversion from lead to clients
Increase lawyer retention through better leads
Guide users with their next steps after submitting a question
Increase credibility and trustworthiness of the site and the ‘ask a lawyer’ feature
Make the form filling process more simplified and user friendly
Identifying Issues with User Research
Research Goals
Understand user’s online behavior and search process
Understand users’ intent to determine where they are in the ‘buyer's journey' or purchase funnel
Understand how people ask questions and what they look for in answers and how they make decisions.
Understand out why people abandon pages
Understand how users convert
The first approach of this redesign was to understand the intentions of our users and their online behavior. To put ourselves in their shoes we asked ourselves why are the users visiting our site, what they are trying to achieve from this website, and how are they using it? To understand the users better and their pain points in the site, we took a very research-driven approach through various techniques such as by using Qualaroo to survey the users directory on the site, tracking clicks and recordings of sessions through Hotjar to learn users’ behavior, Google Analytics for site’s performance and also our internal web stats data to track various site metrics.
By gathering and analyzing these research data we learned why the users were visiting the site, how they were navigating it, and understood their pain points. This enabled us to put ourselves in their shoes which helped us design better user experiences for them to easily post questions, and seamlessly navigate the site to find answers to their questions. We iteratively presented and validated the features which evolved based on users’ feedback and research findings.
UNDERSTANDING USERS’ ONLINE BEHAVIOR
Heatmaps Analysis
Visitors’ Session Recordings
To get insight into the user behaviors we utilized Hotjar, a web analytics tool which created heatmaps of user interactions through visual representation of clicks, taps, hovering and scrolling behavior on different devices. With this we were able to understand what areas of the pages are getting the most and least attention.
Through Hotjar we were also to capture videos of real users using the site which gave us a glance into users’ true experience on the site which was helpful to identify friction points that can be optimized. Within the interface, we were able to filter by pages visited, number of pages visited, time on site, device type, browser, operating system, date, and more. By analyzing these recordings it gave us insight into how specific types of users are interacting with specific pages on site, and how they were converting or not converting.
Users’ Survey and Feedback
In addition, to understand the user intents and pain points we also launched Qualaroo survey and got some very insightful responses from the users. This is where we were able to get honest feedback from the users. It’s a direct line to our users where we could hear it from their own words what they like / dislike about the site, why they visit, and what they think needs improvement. The survey was a direct way to communicate with and understand our users.
RESEARCH FINDINGS
Goals
With these findings we came up with following goals:
Simplify the ‘ask a lawyer’ form and improve the questioning process.
Guide the users to find information they are looking for with clear CTAs and titles
Recommend best matched lawyers based on searched topics. They prefer specialists more than generalists.
To optimize for mobile since many of our users view our site on their smartphones.
Optimize question form to
Make more users form and submit better questions to get better answer
Increase conversion from lead to clients
Increase lawyer retention through quality leads
Guide users with their next steps after submitting a question
Increase credibility and trustworthiness of the site and the ‘ask a lawyer’ feature
Make the form filling process more simplified and user friendly
