Designing for people who can't afford to be wrong

Overview

Role

UX designer — one of three. Research, information architecture, wireframes, usability testing.

Timeframe

2020–2021

Team

3 UX designers · product manager · 3 engineers · 2 in-house lawyers · QA · product marketing · customer success

Users

Lawyers, law firms, researchers, lecturers, students, government bodies and the judiciary

The product

Primsol is the legal research platform Nigerian lawyers use to prepare cases — judgments, law reports, statutes at federal and state level, textbooks, journals and court forms in one place.

It matters more than a research tool in most markets. Nigerian case law isn’t comprehensively available anywhere else, so for a lot of practitioners this isn’t a convenience layer over public data. It’s the access.

By 2020 it had been running long enough to have accumulated everything products accumulate, and it was starting to lose the new users it was winning.

What was wrong

The team ran a full experience review before anyone designed anything — designers, engineers, product management, product marketing, customer success and the two in-house lawyers, going through the product against a benchmark.

Workflows had grown without structure. Years of additions had produced what we described at the time as a kitchen sink of controls, with copy written in language that assumed you already knew the system.

Drop-off was worst at setup. Very high, which pointed at onboarding and at complexity people met before they’d got any value.

It couldn’t take another feature. The architecture hadn’t anticipated growth, so every addition made the next one harder.

And the content was being scraped. People were pulling material off the platform for their own use — which mattered commercially, and constrained what we could design, because the obvious fix for discoverability is to open more of it up.

How we worked

Three designers, and a research programme rather than a brief.

We ran interviews and focus groups with practising lawyers, then took the themes from that into a survey we could analyse statistically — clustering respondents into groups that behaved similarly, rather than treating “lawyers” as one audience. A partner at a commercial firm, a lecturer and a final-year student use the same product for genuinely different reasons.

Then an empathy mapping workshop and affinity mapping to get from raw findings to themes the whole team could argue with.

Ideation ran across the whole team, not just design. That was deliberate — the people who’d been supporting this product for years knew things about it that no amount of research would surface in six weeks, and the in-house lawyers were users as well as colleagues.

We filled a lean UX canvas — business problem, business outcomes, users and their desired outcomes, solution ideas, hypotheses — then scored everything on impact against effort.

That matrix is worth showing because of what’s in the top-right quadrant. Counsel profiling, document similarity, AI-assisted search and AI document review all scored high impact and high effort, and we deferred all four. In 2020, with the team we had, shipping the fundamentals well was worth more than starting something we couldn’t finish.

What we found

Two findings shaped everything after them.

Half of respondents said the product was difficult to use. Not slow, not missing features. Difficult.

And 75% of all issues raised were about search — in a research tool, where search isn’t a feature so much as the entire proposition.

Three things we built

Not the full feature list. The three that came directly out of the research.

Search without limits. Filtering across judgments by subject matter, principle and issue — and usable without a subscription. That last part was contentious given the scraping problem, and it was the right call: a research tool that won’t let you search until you’ve paid can’t demonstrate that it’s worth paying for.

Multiple reader tabs. The finding underneath this one is simple and nobody had designed for it. Legal research isn’t reading a document — it’s checking one authority against another, then a third, then going back to the first. Practitioners were doing this across browser windows and losing their place constantly. Tabs inside a single research view matched what they were already doing.

Judgment analysis. Case status, precedence rating, related cases, conflicting cases, history of authorities and citations, presented together. A lawyer needs to know not just what a judgment said but whether it still stands — and that’s exactly the kind of thing that’s catastrophic to get wrong and easy to miss.

What happened

LawPavilion reported an 85% increase in daily active users over the following year, from 6,486 to over 12,000, and a 40% increase in profit within eight months of launch.

Those are the company’s figures rather than measurements I took, and this was a three-designer team inside a much larger project — I’m not claiming the outcome as mine.

What I can speak to directly is the user feedback that came back afterwards, because it named something specific: the multiple reader tabs were what made people stay longer in a session. The feature that came out of watching how lawyers actually cross-reference turned out to be the one that changed behaviour.

What I took from it

I’ve never worked on anything since where being wrong mattered as much. If a social media scheduling tool shows you a number that’s slightly off, you make a slightly worse decision. If a legal research tool tells you a judgment stands when it’s been overturned, someone loses a case.

That’s where the emphasis on status, precedence and conflicting authorities came from — and it’s the same instinct I brought years later to designing what a report should say when it can’t say anything reliable. A tool that admits what it doesn’t know is more useful than one that appears confident.

The other thing was working as one of three designers rather than as the design function. Most of my work since has been the latter, and it’s made me better at moving quickly and worse at the thing this project taught me: that a structure three people have argued about is stronger than one person’s structure, and slower to arrive at for good reason.