GIL Website redesign-A UX case study of an Indian law firm
What is GIL?
Go India legal (GIL) is a legal-tech company established with the mission to provide a wide array of legal and government-oriented services. With multifarious services like GST Registration, RTI filing, Consumer Complaint, and a host of others, GIL provides an array of legal services at the fastest times and the cheapest rates. GIL is the first of it’s kind to provide legal services targeted towards the young crowd.
Why a redesign?
GIL got in touch with me to give their website a fresh look, namely an entire website redesign. They were planning to bring the entire service resolved online. End to end legal solutions without being physically present. After carefully analyzing the website I realized many user pain-points need to be addressed. Thus, a decision to recreate and reinvent GIL website was taken.
Goals
Business Goal: To make the dreaded legal affairs easier for the younger generation, which should aim at increasing the no. of leads.
User Goal:
- To build a solution that aims at giving an easier understanding of the process to the user
- To solve their problems quickly and efficiently
- To help them retain their long term loyalty
Old Website
Problems
“The greatest challenge to any thinker [designer] is stating the problem in a way that will allow a solution.” — Bertrand Russell.
By analyzing each page of the website and pondering on the new requirements I came across the following pain points.
- The website looks outdated
- There was no proper CTA (Call to Action) on the website. It feels more like an informative website
- The brand values of the company were not clearly visible on the website
- No wayfinding methods used, when the user landed on a particular page it was difficult to know where he was
- The content was not structured in a digestible way for the user, it was extremely overwhelming for someone who knows nothing about the legal matters
- UI was cluttered and boring to browse
After analyzing the existing website, I realized I needed to lay some product goals to understand and visualize clearly how I wanted in the end product to look like and how users should feel navigating through it.
Product goals:
- Visually pleasing UI
- Organized and structured content
- Easy to navigate through the services and understand what they needed
- Faster conversion from view to availing the service
Now comes the part where I tried to get to the bottom of the design choices made earlier and why users did not navigate through it.
To accomplish these goals I was given a pretty tight time schedule. (But I pulled it off, watch-out till the end :D)
Timeline
Since their launch was near I was given a pretty tight timeline of 18 days for redesigning their entire website with the implementation of the new features.
20th August 2020 to 7th September 2020
- Wireframe- 28th August
- Low fidelity prototype- 1st August
- High fidelity prototype-5th September
- End product- 7th September
- Iteration followed
My Deliverables
In the time frame mentioned above My role was to deliver all these:
- Strategy
- Competitive Market Analysis
- Personas
- Task flow
- Sitemaps
- Wireframes
- Visual Identity & Design
- Low-fidelity and High-fidelity prototypes
- Interactive prototypes
Target Users
Before I could proceed with the research I needed to understand who I was designing it for. Which was Indian youth ranging from 18 to–35years of age. Users with little to no knowledge about legal services.
This the where I try to learn the user pain-points, for which I typically conduct extensive user-centered research but GIL was different, as it is a legal firm and the user’s confidentiality was the utmost priority so I couldn’t personally interview or talk with the users. (There was also a monetary constraint on hiring potential users to test it on) The marketing team and the development team briefed me with all the necessary inputs. But, That didn’t stop me from doing my share of learning and discovering.
Here’s what followed:
Competitive Market Analysis
Top competitors of Go India Legal (GIL) being ‘Cleartax’, ‘Vakil Search’, ‘India Fillings’, ‘All India legal’, and more.
My Key Findings
- Presence of proper CTA
- Has a ‘Why choose us?’ factor
- Clear Visible Pricing
- Has a professional yet approachable voice
- Visual Appeal for every kind of users
- Use of Forms
Persona
From the information, I got about their client base I couldn’t really interpret the kind of people, their pains, and gains that would come across the website. I initiated multiple team meetings with their marketing team, development team, and the stakeholders. In the end I came up with a set of questionnaires that I asked out everyone involved in the process to fill out, only after analyzing the data, I penned two personas that would reflect the target users.
Sameer
Sameer is the first graduate in the family who belongs to a Indian middle-class family. He opened a textile mill as a cottage industry, alongside college with the help of local labor, 5years ago. Now, he’s doing very well and wants to take the business to pan India. But his lack of technical knowledge and absence of guidance as to how to go about it is an obstacle.
“Sameer needs to easily file a GST to sell his products pan India and expand his business”
Dohna
Dohna is a wanderlust at heart, she believes in living in the moment and is never taken a step back from voicing her opinions where there’s injustice. She pursues her dream to travel the world but recently there has been a hiccup. She was cheated by the hotel that she was supposed to stay in for her visit. The hotel refrained from refunding her money. Dohna is stern about her decision to file a complaint against them but doesn’t know how to go about it in a hassle freeway
“Dohna needs to file a consumer complaint on the go to get her money back without disturbing her travel plans”
Sitemap
All the data that I gathered from the research in the learning phase was sketched down in the form of a Sitemap. This was the foundation on which the site is about to be built.
Here’s a link, if you wanna take a deeper look at it: https://app.flowmapp.com/share/a64964b614eb4afc000b6f40bf8f904f/sitemap/
Task flows
Based on the sitemap I defined how the user would complete a task on the website.
Task 1 : For Persona- Sameer
Task: To request a GST service on the website
Task 2: For Persona- Dohna
Task: To check the status of an existing service Dohna availed
These laid the foundation and structure of how the new and improved site should look like.
Wireframes
These are some of the primary level navigation menus that I designed. Multiple iterations happened after this, moving towards the low fidelity prototype.
Low Fidelity Prototypes
To shape my ideas into a more concrete form comes low fidelity mockup wherein I made very little focus on colors and typography instead focused more on laying down the structure at this point.
When all the basic structure was laid down, I moved on to laying out the website color scheme and developing a mini design system to workaround.
After finalizing on the color scheme I moved on to designing smaller elements and icons that will be needed across the site.
Brainstorming and sketching
Final Outcomes
The new and improved website
After weeks of hard work, it was that special moment where I delivered my designer to the team and eagerly waited for their feedback.
Decisions
- We decided to implement the “Instant forms” and “Check status” feature so that the entire end to end service can be achieved online without being physically present. When a user requests a service a reference ID was generated which they could use to check their current status of the request and download receipts when it’s done.
- Used conditional nesting for the forms so that without leaving the page the user can choose different sub-services for a major service
- Concealed most of the information to have a more clean presentable view wherein users can digest the information given and if they need to know more there information was already there a click away.
After delivering the designs it was time to take a seat back and reflect on the choices I made and what more can be improved. I believe no design is ever perfect. The more I look into it the more I understand what else can be improved. True to that the website is still being iterated and new features are being added.
If you wanna take a look at how it looks in the real world, here’s a link to the live website: https://www.goindialegal.com/
Results
- 30% Increase in the page views after the new website went live
- 5% increase in the number of new users
- The refreshing look of the new website appealed to the stakeholders and they loved it.
Conclusion
After working on this GIL website I learned a lot, I got a hands-on approach as to how to deal with real-world constraints and create an MVP. One of my major challenges was that I knew absolutely nothing about the domain i.e Legal tech, I was not understanding certain terms or how the process would work, but the team was extremely supportive and guided me whenever I got stuck. Apart from that, there were technical constraints as well. I felt missing out on real user research was a hurdle but then working around it made me bond with the team a little more and finally with all our inputs we created something better than the previous version.
You must have noticed how the entire website did not have a logo, that is because our branding project was just lined up next to the website redesign. If you wanna see it, and other branding projects, head over to my Behance and Dribbble
https://www.behance.net/gallery/106432811/GIL-Law-firm-Branding
If you read till here, Thank you. Please drop your feedback.
