Alejandro G

1 - Overview

2 - The brief

iManage Share’s main goal is to be the safest way to share legal documents with external parties. After our first round of stakeholder meetings, we discovered that the legal industry needed a product like Share. Still, subscriptions were falling drastically, and the product was at risk of being discontinued. iManage Share needed to know what was needed to be a successful product and not disappear.

3 - Product evaluation

The first step in our research was a heuristic evaluation of the product. What could be improved according to usability standards? One of the problems we found is that the product had not changed since 2012 (see image below) and had serious usability problems. The main features of the product that needed to be tackled were:

1. Unintuitive search engine.

2. Unclear navigation.

3. Wrong use of icons.

4. Lack of feedback to the user.

5. UI inconsistencies.

6. No help section

4 - Interviewing

The second step we followed was interviewing customers and customer support representatives. This last group was the most insightful because we had access to all the support tickets issued during the last four years. Among the thousands of tickets issued, we focused on the high-priority ones and identified them as possible blockers and pain points for our users. We worked with the product and divided the solutions to the problems into two groups: must-have and nice-to-have.

We validated these issues with our clients and defined that the product needed to have the following:

1. Version control.

2. Document tracking. Identify who had modified or downloaded a file.

3. Better search. Customers were having issues finding documents and folders.

4. Online document viewing. The only way to see the documents was by downloading them.

5. Adding comments to documents.

6. Encrypted documents with passwords. Sometimes, the two confronted parts of the same litigation were represented by the same legal firm, and they needed to limit access to other lawyers.

7. Mobile version. Customers are constantly moving to meet other clients and need a fast and easy way to share documents securely on the go.

8. Help section. This was identified as one of the high-priority ones because the only way to resolve doubts about using the product was by asking another colleague or customer support.

5 - User personas

There were no clearly identified main users of iManage Share, so we gathered the information from our user interviews and identified two main users: John and Susan. John is an Associate Legal. He has been part of the Law Firm for ten years and leads a team of 7 lawyers. Susan is a lawyer who works under John's supervision.

6 - Competitive research

The next step in our research was discovering and comparing what other products exist in the market that already do what we are trying to achieve. This was necessary to avoid reinventing the wheel and build an experience similar to what our customers might already be used to seeing. Another reason was to identify other possible features that might be useful to our product.

iManage Share is part of a bigger document management suite called iManage Work, in which the clients store internally all their documents and emails.

From our previous research, we discovered that our clients didn’t want to use commercial products like Dropbox, OneDrive, or Google Drive because it didn’t make them feel secure sharing sensitive documents, and they had to abandon the iManage Work suite to share a document with external parties.

7 - Information Architecture

The next step in our process was to assemble all the content needed for our pages. To fulfill this task, we worked with Product and Development to ensure that what we were trying to achieve was technically doable and in line with the user scenarios. This exercise would also guide us during the wireframing process.

8 - Wireframing phase, testing, and iteration

For our concept to redesign iManage Share, we based our first designs on the structure of the most used document management systems. Doing it this way would create a familiar environment for the user, reducing the friction and frustration of learning how to use another software and impacting their workflow in the minimum way possible.

We added necessary features like filtering and adapted the information shown in the list based on our client’s needs.

We tested our designs in the wireframe phase with five users (1 Associate Legal and four lawyers). Gathering users to test our wireframes was quite a challenge because law firms and lawyers bill by the hour, and they needed to be compensated for the time they were not investing with their clients.

Luckily, they accepted a $100 Amazon gift card with our UX Researcher for one hour.

We used Webex to record the sessions remotely and Invision to create and share quick prototypes. We chose to use moderated testing because we wanted to follow up with our participants about their responses. We were spending significant money on our testing, so we wanted to gather as much meaningful information as possible.

From our testing sessions, we discovered some great points:

1. Most of our users clicked on Recent Documents as soon as they landed on the homepage (we decided that Recent Documents should be our landing page).

2. All of our users were pretty familiar with the use of filters.

3. They all tried to drag and drop documents into a folder (Invision does not support this action).

4. One of our users suggested a notification button at the top of the page, like Facebook. It would be useful to identify the most recent activity and to know immediately if some other colleague had added them to a collaboration folder.

Overall, our testers were pretty excited about the changes we were making to a product most of them had already found obsolete and dated.

9 - Final Result

An easier way to navigate

1. There is new side navigation, including sections like Recents or Favorites.

2. Creation of a filter section to be more efficient in finding content.

3. Introduction of actions on hover. When you hover over an item in the list with your mouse, It shows the most popular actions without clicking.

4. Inclusion of labels in buttons. Now, we don't only rely on the icon.

5. Introduction of sorting results in columns.

Ability to use the company brand

One of the concerns expressed in our customer interviews was being unable to add their brand to the platform. That would make the law firm’s clients feel more secure about sharing sensitive documents, knowing they are uploading them to their own houses.

New Search

In the previous design, you had to execute the search and then sort the items by name or date.

With the new search, the content is displayed more organized and the user is able to browse within the search field.

Document Viewer

The lack of a document viewer was a great deal breaker for our customers. We designed a full-screen viewer with a left panel with thumbnails of the document and a hide-able right panel in which the user could:

1. Add tags to a document to make it easily searchable.

2. Add comments in a conversational mode.

3. Control and see every single version of the document.

4. Share the document.

New Responsive Design

Our users' biggest concern was the lack of a mobile version of iManage Share. Our clients needed the ability to share documents remotely.

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