Client
Epiq is a global technology-enabled services leader to the legal industry and corporations, takes on large-scale, increasingly complex tasks for corporate counsel, law firms, and business professionals with efficiency, clarity, and confidence. Clients rely on Epiq to streamline the administration of business operations, class action, mass tort, court reporting, eDiscovery, regulatory, compliance, restructuring, and bankruptcy matters. Epiq subject-matter experts and technologies create efficiency through expertise and deliver confidence to high-performing clients around the world.
about the website
The Epiq Chapter 11 website serves corporate clients who are undergoing restructuring (bankruptcy). Companies undergoing restructuring are legally required to make information about their bankruptcy case publicly available to anyone who may have a claim against them. The website provides access to claims, dockets, and key documents for all of the Chapter 11 cases so interested parties can stay informed on important case events.
Situation
The first redesign of the website was heavily influenced by senior leadership and their desire to achieve feature parity with the case search page of our top competitors like Prime Clerk. The result was a less-than-usable website that was difficult for users to navigate.
MY Role
Product Designer who selected and partnered with outside design contractors.
Timeline
3 months
Tasks
Simplify the case search experience to reduce time on the search page.
Create a customized experience for premium account users.
The search experience before
Scope Creep and a feature war with competitors resulted in a complex confusing search page
Key stakeholders and Product Management prioritized adding more filter options than the competition on the cross-case search page. They were worried about loosing perspective clients if our experience didn’t prominently feature these options upfront.
Help all users navigate to cases faster by decreasing the amount of time on the cross-case search page.
Enable users to search claims and dockets across all cases, not just within a single case.
Identify opportunities to increase engagement with the site, and possibly discover a path to monetization for non-client users.
The search experience after
simplifying the complex
Google Analytics data helped to illuminate something that design knew all along - the landing page of the corporate restructuring website was too busy. Business stakeholders wanted to cram all the bells and whistles with the intention of impressing clients and outshining competitors. About 80% of users just simply wanted to search for a single case and view it. However, the data revealed that on average users stared at this page for 54 seconds, which was about 40 seconds too long. The most common question I would hear in user testing sessions was “Where’s the search bar?”
Reduce cognitive load with an extra click
I paired with a contract designer and together we created multiple concepts for the website and conducted usability tests. Below is the final concept we settled on. We broke the page into two distinct “80/20” functions. We created an extra click for the 20% user personas, but significantly reduced the time spent on the search page from 54 to 13 seconds.
an account for all
Historically, this website was viewed as a service line (a.k.a an included offering with a client’s claims administration service) and only clients had logins for the website. However my product manager and I envisioned that it could be more than a service line, if we could create unique experiences for the various personas that use the website, we may be able to offer premium features that non-clients would pay for. Yet before we could do that, I had to design an account creation flow and a personalized dashboard.
customized dashboard experience
These are various concept mockups of the dashboard experience. We enhanced the account creation process to allow users to self-identify with the intention to present them a dashboard that is tailored to their needs.
