Company
Paladin, PBC
My Role
MVP Validation
UX & UI
Design System
Product Scope
I was lucky to join Paladin just as we had partnered with the world’s largest law firm, Dentons, to co-develop an MVP to “help lawyers do more and better pro bono”. It was my job to 1) facilitate research, prototyping, and validation 2) synthesize that research 3) build an ongoing product roadmap and prioritization around those findings and 4) design and launch the MVP and following iterations.
What makes helping someone so complicated?
Obviously, the first thing we needed to do was to understand the current way the pro bono system works. Distilling this down into something digestible, we found the majority of pain across all personas was in the early recruitment phase, and then at the very end when trying to report. In order to have the data to report on, and to stem the proverbial bleeding, we decided to focus our MVP on the recruitment process.
An unstructured approach to structuring data
Working with three key personas (Legal Aid Organizations, Pro Bono Program Administrators, and Lawyers), the need for lots and lots of information about each pro bono opportunity became clear quickly. To find all this information, we prototyped input fields purposefully ambiguously, so our testers could share the information most important to them. Our final workflow to create new opportunities attempted to use progressive disclosure to keep the form succinct, while offering additional detailing to those that wanted it.
“I only want to see what I want to see…”
Lawyers are busy people. Instead of showing them every pro bono case and having them develop blindness to those opportunities, lawyers self-select into their interests. These tags are mapped 1:1 with the pro bono cases so we can directly offer exactly what each lawyer wants.
“…and I only want to see it when I want to see it”
Did I mention lawyers are busy? As every other industry has realized, it’s important to give users an experience where and how they want to have said experience. For lawyers, that’s while scrolling through their phones in the bathroom. Our weekly digests are catered to every individuals unique preferences, and also expose cases their pro bono admin would like them to see.
Big numbers are great ’n all but
The real win here is that many more folks who most desperately need help are getting the quality help they deserve. 35% more and better pro bono. Not too shabby for 4 months work.