Rocket Lawyer Internship

Timeline

10 weeks | Summer 2021

Tools

Figma, Pen + Paper

Role

User Research, Persona Development, Design System, UX Design, Prototyping

Overview

In summer 2021, I worked at Rocket Lawyer, a legal tech company aiming to make legal care more accessible. I worked on projects including developing personas and conducting interview, taking responsibility for sections of the UX system redesign, and documenting rules and standards for other designers to use within the design system. As the only product design intern, I was integrated with the rest of the team. I was given ownership of my projects and worked with junior and senior designers to approve and critique my work.

Project 1: Personas

My first project of the summer was developing personas for the design team to utilize. I worked on stories for an internal sales representative and a new business owner. In order to understand their individual struggles, needs, and motivators, I conducted interviews with a handful of sales reps on the Rocket Lawyer team, new business owners, and took advantage of online forums and sites to see do independent research.

Justin is an inside sales representative who graduated in 2011 with a BA in Business Administration. He previously worked in the food industry where he picked up valuable communication skills before pivoting into sales. He is extroverted and has always been able to connect with customers with ease. After gaining experience with a few different companies he moved to Rocket Lawyer where he has been for the past two years. He enjoys working in a fast paced environment and connecting with new business owners who are excited about the tools he is able to sell them.
At Rocket Lawyer, Justin is focused on getting in contact with sales leads and selling incorporations, patents, dissolutions, amendments, annual reports, foreign filings, local business license research, and monthly/yearly memberships. He values customer appreciation and enjoys celebrating successes with a commission, recognition from higher ups and getting together with his coworkers. He likes to start his day off early and on busy days makes up to 85 outbound calls. He manages his time well and stays organized and on top of his leads and clients to keep them content.
Justin works with a variety of internal and external tools to make his day run smoothly. He values the tools that run well and make it easier to monitor his leads and clients. The biggest challenge he faces is outdated software that stops working when he needs it to. In a busy job like inside sales, time is of the essence and programs slowing his progress down can be a frustrating road block.
Selling useful products to excited customers in order to take home a commission.
Needs to get through all untouched leads each day and connect with leads that will generate a sale
Needs to keep tabs on customer activity and sell relevant products
Needs to ensure emails are cleared by the end of the day
Needs to stay organized, manage time well, and work efficiently
Needs to monitor leads, emails, messages, and schedule
Needs to easily create and edit charges for billing clients
Wants to achieve sales goals to bring home commissions
Working with outdated software
Billing process is not very customizable
Inability to see previous interactions of a sale when handed off from one salesperson to another can slow down the process
Having a 3rd party processor for filing incorperations as opposed to in-house processing

Justin — Insider Sales Representative

After 15 years of house painting for other companies, Jack realized if he started his own painting business he could take home a larger profit and be in charge of his own time. He knows he has the skills to be in charge and enough knowledge of painting to run his business well. Although he is confident in his painting skills, Jack is apprehensive about all the work it may entail. With the internet as his resource, he has been researching how to start a house painting business but he doesn’t have unlimited time or money to get his idea off the ground.
Jack is a go getter and excited about the prospect of owning a successful business. He would like to support his wife and kids with the money this idea could bring in. He hopes that this business will support him into retirement when the time comes around. Jack wants to protect his personal assets so he is looking to incorporate his business. He is busy with miscellaneous paint jobs and helping around the house, so his free time is limited. He wants to get his business started as efficiently and cost effective as possible.
Jack is dedicated and on top of his work, and is looking to tackle starting his business in the same manner. One of the larger challenges Jack faces is his lack of knowledge when it comes to starting a business. He isn’t sure what documents he needs so he is considering getting legal advice in addition to using a documentation service to make sure he is on the right track. Through his research on forums and youtube, Jack realized he may not need to pay an expensive lawyer to get incorporated and can use an online service to get the job done cheaper and faster.
Deliver his services to happy customers while bringing in income to support his family.
Wants to legally become an incorporation without spending hours filling out paperwork and doing research
Wants to become and present as a legitimate business
Needs to figure out what type of incorporation he should start and what state to file in
Needs someone to talk to when he has questions
Needs to create many documents from business plan to incorporating his business to making contracts for each paint job
Wants to quickly create contracts to outline expectations and payments for each paint job
Wants to have access documents on the go
Wants to save time and money
Needs to manage inventory, possible employees, contracts, etc. efficiently
Needs more support after incorporating his business
Ensuring all of his paperwork is solid to avoid any complicated and expensive legal trouble
All the necessary paperwork to get started is overwhelming and complicated
Doesn’t have unlimited funds to pour into legal services because he is just getting his business started
The many unknowns and risk of starting a business
Does not have unlimited time to get his business up and running because he has a family and other responsibilities
Managing inventory, different jobs, and employees feels like too much work to keep track of alone

Jack — Small Business Owner

Project 2: Breadcrumb Redesign

To assist in the process of creating components for the site-wide redesign, I was tasked to come up with a new approach for breadcrumbs to solve the existing issues.

The Problem

The current breadcrumb experience was hurting the company’s SEO as well as lacking on accessibility. The font size was too small and not a heavy enough weight. The breadcrumbs were also not placed intuitively and needed to be moved into a more accessible spot. Lastly, the breadcrumbs often wrapped around on mobile devices which needed to be solved in a more elegant design.

Research

To best understand what breadcrumb use made sense for us to use, I conducted research by looking to other sites to see what styles and usage was most effective. I found that in general, using size 12-14pt font was the standard across different sites. Also, the placement of breadcrumbs were almost always directly below the global nav. This makes the breadcrumbs easy to find and gives them a purpose. The mobile breadcrumbs were varied across each site I looked at. For Rocket Lawyer, it made the most sense to find a solution that displayed the entire breadcrumb trail in a clean and user friendly manner.

Ideation

To come up with a solution, I first had to take into account all the specification of the breadcrumb content that would need to be displayed. Rocket Lawyer needed to display the full breadcrumb trail, even when it is lengthly due to long titles and extended words in other languages like Dutch. My design had to solve the issue of how to display all the necessary information without it looking like a mess.

Solution

My breadcrumb redesign included changing the type from 12pt regular weight to 14pt bold sizing to help with accessibly and boost Rocket Lawyer’s SEO ranking. I moved the breadcrumbs from below the hero section to directly below the main navigation. I decided to go with a scrolling breadcrumb approach to solve the problem of text wrapping on smaller screens. This allows users to take advantage of having the full breadcrumb experience at the tip of their fingers as well as saving important screen real estate by condensing the trail into one single line. To indicate that the links scrolled, I implemented a fade feature to help users understand how the trail moves. To increase accessibility for desktop users, I added a back button that prompts the hidden line of text to be shown when clicked.

Making my design usable

For my design to be useful, I also had to create it into a component. I created components for all the use cases and combined them into variants so other designers can drag and drop them into pages in the future.

Documentation

In order to have my design implemented into the new design system, I documented the rules in a way for other designers and engineers to better understand my approach.

Implementation

My design was tested with different templates and is included in the new design system that is currently being built out and engineered into the Rocket Lawyer site. The new breadcrumb experience I designed will be shipped in the near future!

Project 3: Modal Use Documentation

My final project with Rocket Lawyer was to document the use cases for modals across desktop and mainly mobile. I conducted an audit of the current site’s modal use as well as doing research on how other people recommend and are using modals.

Usage and design documentation

I created rules to help other designers decide when to use modals and how to keep the design consistent when using the created modal components. I researched apps and websites to understand how and when they used modals to come up with a comprehensive list of best practices for modals. After coming to a conclusion that limiting modal use on mobile is the most user friendly approach, I redesigned a portion of a wireframe to showcase alternatives for modals.