Mindful Injury Law

Designing a digital brand and web experience that transcend the injury law stereotype.

Company

Mindful Injury Law

Sept - Oct 2020

Role

Web Design

Webflow Dev

User Research

Team

E.L. Lucas

Deliverables

Responsive Website

Style Guide

Background

Not your typical personal injury law firm

Mindful Injury Law, a personal injury law firm in California, aimed to separate itself from the "ambulance-chaser" stereotype in the industry & reposition it's brand to achieve greater relevance with a growing cohort of "mindfulness-focused" clients. I partnered with another designer to rebuild the Mindful Injury Law brand and experience across every touchpoint.

Result

The result of our engagement with Mindful Injury Law was a refined brand strategy & responsive web experience that organically caters to a mindfulness-focused clients by providing a resource-based website offering up both legal services and mindfulness resources.

Customer Goals

How might we create a personal injury law experience that deviates from the stereotype and enables users to feel safe & connected?

As a small team, we decided to focus on our efforts on improving how to display the legal information as simple as possible and improve access to mindfulness resources. Also, have you ever heard a lawyer who incorporated mindfulness into their practice? This had to be done in a very specific way.

Market Research

Users have needs beyond just image recognition

My partner and I started by doing competitive research into the personal injury law market and auditing competitive experiences. We looked at over 15+ law firms, evaluating their overall web experiences, information architecture and CTAs.

Insights:

Underlying design & content trends across web experiences
Areas of Practice, Team & Verdict Rates were consistent in IA across most experiences
Firms tended to focus heavily on driving SEO via high-volume blogs
CTA's focused on driving case referrals or directly contacting the firm
Lack of resources for clients dealing with their injuries or mental health during engagement

User Research

Clients want to see proof of empathy

With better insights into the competitive legal websites, I started to gather qualitative data from users and interviewed 6 participants over Zoom, all of whom had some prior experience with legal engagements. We asked them questions about their experience during these engagements like, "walk me through your most recent experience engaging with a personal injury attorney" and "talk to me about what technology you engaged with during your case".

Insights:

Users want to see & experience proof of empathy
Users felt engagements were transactional and lacked trustworthiness
Users had trouble accessing firm's resources

"I want a positive verdict for my case, but I want to work with a PI attorney who is authentic & actually cares about my well-being during our engagement."

Denise

Participant

Account Executive

Problem Statement

Personal injury clients need a way to feel safe & connected to their lawyers because they are often seen in the market as ‘ambulance chasers’ and not trustworthy.

Opportunity

A resource-based web experience

Given what we had learned regarding clients current experience engaging with personal injury attorneys and competitive research into other legal web experiences, my partner and I defined several opportunities for addressing problems users were facing.

Opportunities:

Create a space where the law firm could drive trust and support client's feelings throughout the process
Create exercises to assist them with recovery

Information Architecture

Prioritize legal services and mindfulness resources

With the problem statement in hand, we synthesized findings and mapped out the sitemap for the firms’ website. For content hierarchy we primarily focused on a few themes.

Content heirarchy:

30% Legal Services
40% Mindfulness Resources
10% About
20% Blog

It’s a good combination to showcase the firm’s legal expertise while demonstrating it’s mindfulness resources for clients & still keeping in mind things like SEO via a blog.

Patterns for each service

Prioritize firm value and conversion on home

Using learnings from having developed the information architecture, I started to design lo-fidelity wireframes - focusing on understanding placement of the websites UI elements to ensure discoverability. I kept in mind design patterns across other legal website experiences in order to drive consistency. To better understand logic and placement of UI elements, I tested these wireframes across a set of 5x participants having them each walk thru a single task "Refer a Case".

Insights:

Users couldn't find Refer a Case section
Users asked for client testimonials to drive trust
Users asked for more context on law firms value and validation

Iterations

Adding value and improving discoverability

I made changes to the lo-fidelity wireframes based off of insights and reorganized information architecture of the home page to improve discoverability of key CTA sections. Before getting to high-fidelity, I did a UI audit of new mid-fidelity wireframes to ensure interactions between each page made sense so that user's could easily perform each task and to ensure sections addressed needs that users were looking for as soon as they arrived on Mindful Injury Law's website.

Insights:

Added testimonials to home page to improve social proof & trust
Added more context on legal services and firm's value to home page to drive validation and improve "Why Mindful Injury Law"

Style Guide

Reusable components that account for multiple devices

We developed a style guide to account for easier implementation in Webflow & reusability across multiple devices. To support the firm's new identity, we developed a complimentary typography and color palette focused on driving the firm's trustworthy and mindful brand experience. We used a navy color palette primarily which we believed could create a soft-mindful tone yet be business-friendly. For typography, we worked thru multiple iterations of serif + san serif combinations and ended up landing on Canela and Maison Neue which paired nicely and aligned with the tone we were aiming to set with the experience.

Usability insight

Discoverability still needs to be improved

We tested high-fidelity wireframes with a set of 5 participants, all of whom had recent engagements with attorneys and familiarity with searching for legal counsel online. Trends across all users indicated a lack of affordance regarding the top navigation bar - users didn't know how to find mindfulness resources. We architected a simple solution by creating drop-downs for larger categories in navigation to make it easier for users to get to auxiliary pages for case types and resources.

Landing page

Positioning the firm's unique approach

This was a novel approach to legal services so we wanted clients to know right away that upon arriving to Mindful Injury Law’s website - they’d be engaging with a totally new experience. We focused on a soft, mindful tone when approaching copy in the hero section while still balancing the need to drive business to the firm by creating a section below the fold driving value and describing the firm's capabilities. Testimonials proved to be widely appreciated during research - so we aimed to prioritize them in a refined way down the page to drive trust.

Resources and exercises for clients

A challenge we encountered was developing accessible and easy to follow meditation exercises for clients provided our minimal resources. Working together with the founder, we developed a home base for all mindfulness exercises and came up with text-based short form exercises to ensure they were digestible. These pages were key to solving the ultimate problem of deviating away from the stereotype and offering up content to clients that wanted continued support during their legal engagement.

Workshops

A space where clients interested in learning more about mindfulness could sign up for monthly workshops hosted by the firm’s founder. These workshops had been previously hosted on an ad hoc basis by the firm for a number of years at this point - but by designing this page - we were able to create opportunities for clients to sign up before events as well as create opportunities for the firm to grow an audience.

"I get a lot of compliments on my site. A contractor I worked with was really impressed and this helped seal the deal".

Chad

Client

Partner, Mindful Injury Law

Next steps

Measuring success

There were a number of next steps we recommended to the team post-engagement in an effort to measure success of the rebrand & redesign. Next steps for the Mindful Injury Law team included:

Validation steps:

Use GA to compare and measure conversion rate % before and after redesign
Multi-variate testing of form placement on home to optimize conversion
Conduct a survey with clients on site redesign to help validation - does it continue to solve for the stereotype problem across a larger set of users?

Learnings

Incorporating disparate elements into a single experience

Given the Mindful Injury Law brand was focused on delivering two seemingly disparate services to its clients, it was a challenge to determine the best way to 'mindfully' incorporate the clients requests while still ensuring their brand stayed within focus. It was personally exciting to help create a brand and a website for the firm that would help break the mold & provide clients with an overall better customer experience. Proper collaboration and compromise (amongst not only the design team - but the client) were also key learnings when reflecting on this project.