The purpose of this project was to enable in-house legal teams to collect data from custodians (people with data) without needing assistance from IT. As part of a platform of tools supporting the EDRM (Electronic Discovery Reference Model) workflow, this collection tool allows legal professionals to define the parameters for their collection (custodians, data sources, and date range) and collect that data so that it can be reviewed for relevance to legal matters. My role was to create wireframes, mockups, and prototypes, and conduct customer research to validate design decisions. During this project I collaborated with Product Management, Engineering, and Customer Success.
This project was a fun blend of technical complexity and a tight timeline. Because we had to move quickly, I partnered with the Product Manager to understand the high level requirements and used those as the primary input to create wireframes to help the Engineering team estimate the level of effort for the project.
While the team started the foundational work, I collaborated with the Product Manager and members of the Customer Success team to conduct a first round of user interviews. This helped us validate our understanding of users’ current collection workflows and related needs.
Since this was a highly technical project, I collaborated closely with Engineering to ensure I captured all necessary steps and inputs in the workflow. After fleshing out higher fidelity mockups, I created a prototype to better illustrate the end to end experience. I then led a second round of user research, using this prototype to validate the designs with additional customers.
Through user interviews, we discovered that many customers require a more granular level of control when defining the parameters for their collections. This helped us define what customers would be a good fit for our initial release. In our second round of research I was able to get more specific feedback around the design and gaps in functionality. This input helped prioritize the additional work planned for future iterations.
From a technical standpoint, I was able to flex my skills in detailed collaboration with an Engineering team to make sure all requirements were understood from both sides. Since this development team was new to the platform that this tool was being built in, it was also a practice in making sure my design specs were detailed thoroughly enough for those who had less context or prior experience.
