The project

Rocket Lawyer’s attorney services product, or Ask a Lawyer, helps connect customers with attorneys. In this project the business explored how to leverage a legal public forum in addition to collecting questions privately to help serve a greater audience while also generating content for SEO.

On a monthly basis, Rocket Lawyer users ask on average of 3,500 legal questions and receive around 3,500 responses from qualified attorneys. Furthermore, approximately 17,500 users come to the Rocket Lawyer Q&A landing page on a monthly basis, about 6,000 start questions, but 99% of them abandon primarily due to hitting a check-out page.

Since the launch of the Rocket Lawyer Q&A product, our users and attorneys have created a tremendous amount of high value content on the Rocket Lawyer platform, but we have yet to capitalize on it. We have an opportunity to offer customers free legal advice in return for publishing this content on our website. With the Public Q&A project, Rocket Lawyer will launch a community of highly engaged users and lawyers.

Method to Measure success

Our data team along with the product manager expected efforts in this project investment to yield a return on investment. The following are a list of key results expected to be generated by fully implementing the public Q&A project. Here are some of the metrics that the team would track.

1. The SEO benefits of this content will increase with time but this averages to a 10% increase in visits in the first three years.

2. Increase average number of legal advice questions per month by 100% from 3.5K per month to 7K per month

3. Drive an additional 18K gross conversions over a three-year period
   

The Challenge

The biggest challenge for this project was to provide a free service and a premium paid service to an entire customer base. This meant the design needs to balance the business objectives, get users to opt into a premium service, and also provide browsing users with the opportunity to find more general legal help. Providing a free public option meant thinking about the following challenges:

• Ensuring that users and lawyers are protected from potential legal recourse

• Protecting user privacy and anonymity

• Utilizing a 3rd party platform to provide the public forum service portion means limited control over the overall experience.

• Creating legal options for different types of users in one experience

Initial research

Initially, I looked into user research conducted by another designer to better understand the current experience for customers asking a question and identify customer pain points.

Defining UX Goals

1. Differentiate value of the paid membership vs. free option

2. Balance user expectations about product clearly and early on

3. Make it easy for people to ask their questions and receive/refer to their answers later

4. Design a safe environment that makes users feel comfortable asking their legal questions

5. Create opportunities that lead users into paid channels to take specific action once questions are answered

   
   

Overall Vision Map

Phase 1 

Wireframes

Competitive analysis also informed the following wireframes, looking into the attorney question and answer services of other competitors also helped to inform the design choices in the wirframing stage. Checking design decisions against the User Goals defined earlier in the stage also acted as a guide that would help balance business objectives while also keeping the users in mind.

In order to move forward into the visual design phase, my responsibility as the product designer was to get buy in from stakeholders, gather their feedback, and understand the objectives of this product from differing perspectives, for example, sales, marketing, and e-commerce.

Some of the flaws surfaced from initial wireframe design reviews revealed that more clarity was needed around pricing, and correctly positioning a private question would be ideal from a legal perspective and making sure that users knew exactly what risks they may experience from posting publicly.

Invision prototype v1

Invision Prototype - v2

Trade offs

In the wire frame stage reviewing design with stakeholders and looking at the design goals informed a change in approach. Rather than making users select the method they would receive their answers, we tried to tailor their experience based on a private or public experience.

User Insights

In order to inform design decisions I conducted an initial test of an existing user flow to gather qualitative user data. In the test, I was interested to learn more about a few different behaviors.

1. Do users feel comfortable to enter their information in the beginning of the flow?

2. What are the users expectations around receiving their answer?

3. Do users understand the risks of posting their questions for free?

4. What instances do users feel comfortable to post questions for free? And when do they prefer a private experience?

Mobile Visual Design and Invision Prototype

A few iterations later…

This design is trying to achieve a lot in a small space:

1. The design focuses on the user’s need first, inviting the user to ask their legal question.

2. To capture and save the users question we ask them to set up an account or login.

3. Once the user poses their question, we ask how they’d like to get their answer, privately or publicly, while also educating them about the member benefits.

4. For users who initially choose to submit their question for free, there is an additional and purposeful point of friction, to allow the user review their question one last time, and also have a second opportunity to opt back into a private answer.

5. The user checks out or lands in their dashboard, where they will receive their answer to their legal question.

High-fidelity Visual Design

The purpose of this High fidelity visual design is to communicate in detail the interactions and variable user experienced based on a logged in versus logged out flow. Building designs in Webflow also gives the designers more control when communicating breakpoint behaviors to developers.

Open this prototype on your desktop or your phone to get a detailed example of the full experience from both perspectives. See working prototype