I designed, built and shipped a new product pilot that helped qualify and match consumers with engaged attorneys, satisfying both sides of the legal marketplace.
This idea was conceived of by a content strategist peer and I during a Sprint 2017 Hackathon. We saw it as a clear UX win and potential new revenue source for Avvo. Despite being unable to find a Hackathon developer partner, we forged ahead and produced an experience vision for the product that garnered praise and attention and won the People's Choice award.
It was an idea that stayed with me throughout the summer, but it (understandably) never received the kind of attention and priority it deserved within our overburdened product team. Therefore, I took it upon myself to figure out how to produce a first-step pilot test of this experience that didn't require any developer support, and worked with partners across organizations at Avvo to make it happen.
Consumers on Avvo are faced with paradox of choice for attorneys. The breadth of lawyers we can show them is impressive, but daunting. They have little beyond the data we show them which will be a good fit for their case. They're left with the time-consuming responsibility to contact each potential option, share their details, and find out if that lawyer can help them and deserves their business.
Attorneys on Avvo have a different but related problem. During their day, between working with clients, they or their staff have to field many cold contacts to determine which are viable leads and which are a good fit for their services. This takes time and is therefore expensive, and an aspect of their jobs that they have expressed to Avvo as being one of the most burdensome.
My UX partner and I researched the opportunity and found an optimal practice area (Immigration, due to common federal laws) and defined a scope for a test. We produced the consumer-facing content required to adequately qualify consumer cases. We recruited a team of Account Managers to shortlist a group of attorneys to become our beta testers for this opportunity and created and distributed to them a series of onboarding emails and documents to aid them in helping us.
I worked with our Brand and Marketing teams to understand how to position this offering on the site and then conducted user research with the help of our talented research team to learn from real users and refine our experience before launch.
I figured out a appropriately scrappy setup for getting my newly designed placements across the site and configured a way to use Outlook mail rules to manage the intake and distribution of cases that flowed through our system.
We ran our test for two weeks on site, targeting specific geographies and garnering dozens of consumer cases to field to our attorney pool. After launching the test, I monitored the performance continuously, made improvements to content to increase conversion rates and user flow, and tracked all the results for later analysis. Post-test, we consolidated findings, interviewed both consumer and attorney participants and produced a summary presentation that we shared broadly.
This was a fruitful venture in terms of helping Avvo recognize the potential of this kind of matchmaking model, and in gaining key learnings about an experience like this. We received countless kudos from many people from within Avvo, and I'm forever grateful for their support and encouragement.
We've been challenged to follow-up this initiative and I look forward to a second run at the concept in the 2018. Our learnings from these tests guided Avvo's 2018 roadmap leading to an key theme of producing a better, matchmaking-centric product experience.
Overall this particular project was insightful in terms of understanding my abililty as a UX individual contributor to drive a larger initiative and garner support through action, confidence, and determination. I was impressed by the multitude of individuals that jumped to help with my iniative and grateful for their encouragement, positivity, and skills. The success of the project execution is testament to Avvo's culutre of teamwork as well as autonomy and empowering builders.
