UX Writing Case Study

Case study background.

The Better Law Firm is an imagined injury law practice focused on car accident services.

The firm is ready to take a fresh approach to serving South Florida car accident victims — one that puts responsive, transparent client service front and center.

Project goals.

The Better Law Firm is concerned with losing clients to the next Zillow of the legal world. 

Their team wants to connect with car accident victims who would not necessarily hire a traditional law firm, but would hire an affordable alternative legal service provider that makes the car accident recovery process feel simple. Think LegalZoom or Rocket Lawyer. 

To do this, they’ve hired a UX-focused marketing team to build out a new website and other digital products. Their goals for the project are to:

1. Build a more user-friendly site

2. Clearly demonstrate their value to the user, which is to: 

   (a.) Make the car accident recovery process feel clear, doable, and transparent

   (b.) Offer a different kind of client experience compared to that of a traditional injury firm

My approach.

I worked solo for this case study. My self-assigned tasks included:

• Create three high-fidelity prototypes for select screens of the website, including the homepage

• Interview two subjects to gather client persona data

• Research language from injury law client conversations on the web, including Google Reviews

• Analyze UX copy of competitor websites

• Build a mini style guide by using conversation data and personas

Research and process.

Google Reviews: Conversation Research

To understand how car accident clients talk about their top concerns—and how The Better Law Firm should speak to these pain points—I researched Google Reviews for two competitor law firms in South Florida: The Law Firm of Cohen and Cohen (Hollywood, FL) and Morgan & Morgan (Miami, FL).

First, I identified the most common topics and keywords referenced among 94 written reviews. Then, I tagged each review that referenced these topics and keywords—and determined which of these were mentioned most.

Competitor Website Analysis

LegalZoom and Rocket Lawyer are two alternative legal service providers that place the user’s convenience at the forefront of their businesses. I asked: How do LegalZoom and Rocket Lawyer’s homepages (above the fold) make first impressions on the reader and present their value?

Through copy that empowers the user to be their own legal hero, Rocket Lawyer calls the reader to explore resources and address their own pain points with confidence. A lawyer’s help is presented as one tool among many other solutions the user can easily access.

Personas

To put faces on The Better Law Firm’s audience, I created two personas. To flesh out these users’ needs, I interviewed two people I know who considered hiring a lawyer for past legal needs, but chose not to.

Solutions.

I created high-fidelity prototypes for three central pages of The Better Law Firm’s website:

• The homepage

• ”How it works” (service features and benefits)

• Pricing

To draft low-fidelity prototypes, I used a pen and paper along with Figma. I organized copy docs to work through several drafts of language for each heading, subheading, and body element. With Canva’s help, I designed these high-fidelity pages from scratch.

Learnings and reflection.

With more time and resources, my next steps with this project would be to test these prototypes and continue to iterate.

By using actual data from a law firm, consumer data and interviews, market research, and the collaboration of a UX researcher, I would continue to refine the proposed copy and website features. With these additional resources in hand, I would ask questions like: 

• Could users benefit from additional technology and digital experiences made accessible on the site?  A downloadable Case App tool that tracks case progress and offers daily updates from a lawyer? A live chat feature? A digital document manager?

• When clarifying the unfortunate reality of legal fees, what alternative language, page structures, or use of design elements could inspire the most confidence and boost conversion? Do potential clients have more or less confidence in The Better Law Firm’s service if pricing is described as a portion of the potential insurance settlement?

There are many possible solutions to The Better Law Firm’s goals. My case study offers ideas for language and tools that could be fine-tuned, expanded, or cut from the site as additional data suggests.