Overview
Design
Since this was the first time a product attempted to parse, understand and visualise state court judge decisions, I led design activities to make sure we got design right. These design activities included:
These are some of the activities that I did during the design phase of the SDLC
Collaborative Design
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Sketches
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Wireframes
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Comps
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Usability Testing
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Design System
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High Fidelity Feature Comps (as seen in the product)
I created these wireframes in a workflow that used tools like Sketch, Photoshop and Zeplin, and are currently the production version of Gavelytics' Look and Feel.
Judge Information
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Motion Analyzer
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§170.6 Analyzer
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Ruling Database
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Process
Collaborative Design
In order to understand the user’s mental model of what a solution should be, I periodically sourced and organised collaborative sketching sessions with our personas, where we pitched the high-level problem we had, fleshed it out a bit more through a brief discussion, and started sketching through a design-thinking activity called Design Studio (or Charade), where people get to rapidly iterate designs until they reach an acceptable design maturity.
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Convergent design – sketch
- During the presentation of the second round of design, as patterns start to appear, I start jotting them down paying attention to the following:
Similar UI components used from one design to another.
Common design considerations.
Common interactions.
Technical constraints.
- Designing the main feature of our web-app, the “Motion Analyser” was challenging, as the design constraints stated:
Make “boring lawyerly stuff” sexy,
Make information available at a glance without having to skimming text.
- And the solution had to:
Allow litigators to find outlier motion data
Allow litigators to browse through all motions at a glance
Find the granted or denied rate of particular motion.
Find the volume of motions filed before a judge, broken down by plaintiff, defendant, and comparison to county statistics.
Filter motion data by time-frame
Filter motion data by name
The solution became this:
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I performed a round of usability testing to seek validation at this fidelity. The usability test, an observation session, included a few different states of the software. I moderated and the whole team present in the usability test took notes.
Low-fidelity wireframing
We fixed some of the issues in a prototyping tool once we had learn a bit more about the design.
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Usability Testing
Unsure of the friendliness of the scatterplot (after watching some of our users struggle with it) we decided to explore different options, and conducted an “incognito” A/B testing with two alternatives to the scatterplot.
You want to find a menu item that is well-liked, but has only moderate sales. Assuming that clicking on a chart element will display further information about it, where in the chart would you click to find this information?
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Successful: 20 (20%)
Avg. Time on Task (11.9s)
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Successful: 14 (25%)
Avg. Time on Task (10.1s)
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Successful 24 (44%)
Avg. Time on Task (8.6s)
We got better results with the rightmost solution, however it was still low. And we decided to discard the scatterplot in favour of a table as the main UI element on that page, and added the scatterplot as a complementary view, when it was originally the other way around. Task Success went to 78%.
High-fidelity wireframing
In the high fidelity wireframe below, you can see the secondary view of the motion analyser. This is the version that went live.
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Design System
Our system, included 6 main features with a number of sub-feature within them. To keep consistency across all of them I put together a Sketch àPhotoshop workflow that allowed me to create and reuse individual pieces of design across multiple screens, override some of their values, and then consolidate everything in photoshop.
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