(Role: Visual Design Lead: 5 People. Principle Designer.)

In the fall of 2008 a major player in the global financial and media worlds decided to make a play in the legal search and research world as well. They had already spent millions developing the databases and technologies to rival the biggest players in that space and needed a digital consultancy to help them make their vision a reality. This web-venture would coincide with other web-ventures they were exploring (firsts of their kind for this brand) and required careful image and brand control to align with core values of the organization.

They conducted a “bake off” to determine which agency would execute such a vast undertaking. From the outset the pace was demanding and client-milestones frequent. Our natural inclination was to reinvent how users would interface and interact with this content, ultimately taking it with them to other platforms beyond the RIA. Due to technical constraints of the Flex platform (as of the time of this project’s design) certain interface paradigms simply couldn’t be employed. Therefore we needed to be extra clever with what we had. How could we make something both traditional and revolutionary at the same time?

Certain aspects of the interface paradigm we proposed needed to be somewhat traditional to perform consistently through all use-cases (due to the relative immaturity of the Flex framework). Couple that fact with our target audience, legal professionals of all stripes, and you have a recipe for innovation through holistic thinking. Meaning no single aspect of the proposed design could be too crazy/different (due to either the appetite of our legal professional audience or the limitations of Flex) however lots of little innovations around document acquisition, browsing, sharing, storing and mark-up made for an exciting new product. It helped that the competitors in the space were still stuck in a web 1.0 mentality of page refreshes and zero richness of experience.

We began by rethinking how to conduct a search to acquire the desired document and fanned out from there to visualize and display related documents. During the search process we leveraged the concept of faceted search refinement and smart/visual query building. Once a document was rendered we wove in other useful and relevant content such as rich data visualizations of industry trends and tracking dockets over time to continue to offer the full 360 perspective.

The product roadmap for this program includes document portability as well as enhanced social capabilities for intra-organization collaboration and knowledge sharing.

Sometimes a project is revolutionary by nature and doesn’t need to have next-gen-everything thrown at it. As designers, our first impulse is to throw everything at projects including the kitchen sink. This project was a lesson in efficiency, meticulousness and restraint. It is scheduled to go into beta testing in the Fall of 2009.