TeamConnect is Mitratech's end-to-end enterprise legal management (ELM) solution for legal professionals. Paralegals and attorneys who use TeamConnect spend most of their time in Outlook and prefer to do most of their work there for efficiency.

Unlike some of my other projects here at Mitratech, designing Matter Creation was a quick and scrappy process:

The create matter screen went through several iterations. The main feedback we heard from the clients was that they want as few clicks as possible. Therefore, we decided to make matter creation a one-page process with an option to create another on the next screen.

We had to brainstorm how to show success/error messages upon hitting the submit button. Do we want to show it as a pop-up or show on the matter creation window? If we chose the latter, where on the screen should we show it? If it's inside the scrollbar, the message would not be in view when scrolling down to review the form. This would mostly be problematic in the case of getting an error message and scrolling down to fix the error that the message states. After discussing this with the clients in the working group, as well as discussing internally, we narrowed it down to showing the message on the screen rather than a pop-up to reduce the number of clicks. From there, we decided to place the message at the top of the screen, above the scrollbar, so that the message is always in view.

Another question we ran into was "what would the user like to see on the right-side panel in Outlook upon clicking on the ‘Return to Inbox' button after successfully creating a matter? Would they like to see all of the matter folders or only the newly created matter?" We asked these questions in another working group, and everyone unanimously agreed that it would be more useful to see a filtered view of the newly created matter.

Designing the search workflow was challenging. I originally wanted a typeahead search, but we went against it due to performance; every time a user typed a letter in the search field, it would have to talk to the TeamConnect server and bring the results back. Therefore, we decided to settle for a search pop-up that would activate the search upon hitting the search icon. We covered the different scenarios and workflows in the client working group to ensure that we were building this to deliver the most positive experience possible.

After three client working groups and countless internal discussions and brainstorming sessions, I created and delivered the design specs in XD to the dev team for implementation. The design specs included 8 final screens, 4 clickable prototypes, as well as all of the key UI elements that the developers must know to build the product. After the hand-off, I worked very closely with the developers to make sure all of the acceptance criteria had been met. Due to time constraints and limited resources, the final product did not end up looking exactly like my mockups. Balancing user needs with business requirements, I learned to negotiate and adjust expectations in order to make sure the end user goals were met.

This has to be one of my favorite projects I've worked on at Mitratech because of the amount of creative freedom I had, as well as the experience I gained. Because we built this product from scratch, we weren't bound by as many very specific boundaries as we would with legacy systems. I enjoyed working closely with the dev team during the implementation process; this team (we called ourselves the Titans) was extremely collaborative and open to ideas. Communicating information in every phase of the design process is the biggest lesson I learned from this project.