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:

Ask a Lawyer’ Main Page

Q&A Page

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.

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.

Site
Lawyers.com

Parent Company
Internet Brands

Role
Product Owner

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

**User’s online behavior analysis**

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.

**Heat-maps analysis**

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.

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.

“Make it easy to find what I am looking for & do what I want to do! I am finding that next to impossible…”

— Site visitor.

“Hard to follow and/or unable to follow the exact thing to do.”

— Site visitor

“I just didn't happen to find the information to my particular question.”

— Site visitor

Research Driven 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.
Optimize for mobile since many of our users view our site on their smartphones.
Make more users form and submit better questions to get better answer
Increase lawyer retention through quality leads
Guide users with their next steps after submitting a question