RESEARCH

Insight, a feature of Thomson Reuters FindLaw, is a marketing tool for law firms. My team was tasked to research the source of the tool’s low usage and improve its experience design, but the research that ensued led to a very different outcome.

Design Highlights

  • Discovery workshop to understand the technical, customer and business background

  • Customer interviews

  • Customer workshop

  • Creation of personas and journey maps

  • Final report and recommendation

 

We Delivered Personas & User Journeys

 

An Inconsistent Experience and Low Value

Insight is a tool that tells law firms where their client leads are coming from all the way from site visit to conversion, and how their marketing portfolio is performing historically and vis-à-vis competition. We can do this because we can abstract the data from as many customers (>50,000) law firms as TR has. However, metrics showed very low usage while customers reported using other data sources to meet their needs. Meanwhile, the product UI and experience was old and poor.

INSIGHT’S UI

 

The Opportunity to Raise Product Value and Increase Usage/Revenue

The goal of the research is to reduce confusion and inconsistency in customers experience. We aim to offer customers the data they need to support the full value of their marketing investment with FindLaw; and offer TR support teams a tool that helps them articulate its value with confidence.

 

Hypothesis

  1. Insight is missing a lot of critical data to provide a comprehensive analysis of a firm’s portfolio performance.

  2. Users use alternative sources to find that critical data, thereby spending more time completing their analysis.

  3. The tool offers poor user experience and branding which impacts usage and loyalty.

  4. External customers want simple data to understand portfolio performance.

  5. There is an inconsistency in story telling based on the user’s perspective.

Target Users

The tool was used both by external and internal customers: law firms and Thomson Reuters account managers. We focused on the small but high value external customer segment: high paying law firms. If we could raise the product value for this segment, the value would trickle down to lower value customers (a much larger base). These 3 roles were identified:

  • TR Digital Marketing Strategist (customer account manager)

  • Marketing Directors of high-value law firms

  • Attorneys

 
 

User Interviews

GOAL

Understand users roles, goals and motivations, how they use the product and their challenges.

INTERVIEWEES

6 account managers at Thomson Reuters, 6 attorneys from customer law firms

APPROACH

1 hour recorded Webex calls with each end user. Interviewees received an Amazon credit gift to thank them for their time.

Some of the questions asked:

  1. Tell us about a typical session within the tool.

  2. What do you expect the Insight tool to provide you with?

  3. What metrics are you looking for in order to understand how your [client’s] portfolio is performing? (# of site visits, # shares received via social media)

  4. What key performance indicators are you looking for? (# of cases, phone calls, office visits resulting from FindLaw solutions)

 
“I’m not confident with the data that’s showing because I can’t link to it and validate it, and that makes me nervous.”
— An account manager, Thomson Reuters
 

CUSTOMER QUOTES

 

Customer Workshop

GOAL

In a 2-day workshop, we aimed to validate assumptions and findings with our identified personas. Present patterns in goals, behaviors through an empathy map, and usage of Insight. Create a journey map.

THE OUTCOME

  • Empathy maps

  • Journey maps


 
 

What We Learned From the Research

We anticipated 2 personas but found a 3rd one through our interviews: the Marketing Specialist at law firms.

All users agreed that Insight’s Contacts tab was the most useful and needed feature. Our findings included:

  1. Personas: Customers have widely varying marketing sophistication and information needs that Insight must accommodate.

  2. Attribution: Customers want greater clarity on effectiveness of components of their marketing solution, ie. which tactics, products and spend are most effectively driving contacts.

  3. Context, Interpretation & Guidance: Customers want context as to whether their performance is good/bad, getting better/worse, mostly through trend comparison.

  4. Functional Uses: Customers use Insight as a functional tool; usage goes beyond summarized value reporting, ie. data downloads, lists of specific contacts.

 

Our Recommendation

We validated 4 out of 5 points of our hypothesis, with the exclusion of the last point on storytelling: The tool was missing critical data which users found in alternative sources, and its poor UX was hindering usage and loyalty. Lawyers wanted simple data but marketing specialists within law firms wanted comprehensive data.

 We proposed 3 possible outcomes for Insight:

  • Beef up Insight: Integrate Google analytics and other commonly used tools APIs into Insight

  • Lean version: Keep only Contacts and boost the feature

  • Sunset Insight: Integrate the Contacts feature into other existing tools (ie. Lead Manager, Business Intelligence, Site Catalyst etc)

FindLaw leadership chose to sunset the product and integrate Contacts, its most useful feature, into the Lead Manager tool on FindLaw’s platform.