Avvo Mobile App
Project date: 2015–2016
My Role: Lead Designer
Other team members: Product Manager, iOS Engineers (2), Content Strategist, QA, Data Analyst.
Project description: In 2015 I was part of a team tasked with building a native app experience for Avvo’s lawyer directory. Our goal was to build the best possible experience for finding a lawyer. In 2016 our app was selected as one of Apple’s featured apps in the iOS App Store under the ‘Best New Apps’ category, it was also reviewed by MacWorld.
The Challenge
Our goal was to provide the best possible experience for finding, and hiring a lawyer. Avvo already had a web-based lawyer directory, but the focus of this project was to take advantage of the benefits a fully native mobile experience could provide. Specifically, we knew from research & analytics that: the majority of people browsed Avvo on their mobile devices, location was very important when finding a lawyer, people often contacted multiple lawyers while looking for the right one, and legal situations are often very personal which can result in a fear of doing the needed research on shared or work computers.
My process
One of the best parts about working on this project, was that it gave us a fresh start to design one of our existing products from scratch. We started by looking to our existing research to answer the questions: “What attributes are most important when choosing a lawyer?”, “What is currently working/not working in the current experience”, “What problems are we uniquely positioned to solve with a mobile app?”. After defining the problems to solve, and setting the goals for the project, we began sketching & brainstorming ideas. From there we built prototypes of the interesting concepts and put them to the test.
Research used to determine hierarchy of information on the profile and search results.
This is a user journey map of the process of hiring an attorney, this resource wasn’t available to us when we first designed the app, but it helped drive design decisions after our initial release.
Exploration of navigation options
Results
Qualitatively, the mobile app was well received by our users, and in 2016 was featured by Apple in the App store under the ‘Best New Apps’ category. Although the app never came close to the number of active users that Avvo.com had, mobile app users were more than twice as likely to re-engage with Avvo than web users.
Project Gallery
What didn’t work? (Spoiler: Tinder for lawyers.)
One of the prototypes I put together and tested was this concept of a curated list of lawyers that you could swipe through, which garnered several reactions from participants along the lines of “Hey, it’s like Tinder!”. Despite the initial excitement, we found that this method of browsing didn’t really add much to people’s experience. Several people were confused by the interaction, and most ended up opting for the list or the map view to do their browsing.