Large transactions normally involve many parties (i.e. companies, investors, banks); numerous sensitive documents must be agreed with throughout the process, and as you may imagine, security is a top priority for them, as well as the ability to restrict documents to the relevant people in the deal.
A lot of users that are currently piloting our product requested this feature, and they even said they wouldn’t go ahead and sign up for the product without this feature baked right into it.
We are now building it and will be launching an MVP shortly.
This will allow them to have all their documents in the same place, but with different access settings, so sensitive documents are safe and only authorised users have access to them.
I worked with the Product Managers and with users to identify the problem, gathering information to work out user stories that allowed me to understand in what situations users would require restricted access to documents.
User stories helped gather the core requirements, which were then followed by process flows, sketches, wireframes and prototypes.
The HEART framework was created in collaboration with the team to help us define the right metrics for this feature.
This was just a short summary. If you are truly interested, feel free to grab a coffee and read through the whole process from beginning until now.
Transact is a new Workshare product. It was acquired last year at a very early stage and we are working hard to turn it into a platform lawyers can use to easily manage complex deals from start to finish.
We are currently at pilot stage with three global law firms. Together, they have more than 3.000 employees, and the ultimate goal is to make Transact an integral part of their workflow while automating what is currently a very manual and stressful process, saving them money, time and energy.
The video below will provide you with some much needed context and explain more about Transact as a product with the added bonus of showcasing some of the illustrations I've done 😁.
With the current implementation, participants of a deal have access to all the documents in the deal environment. Most of our competitors offer access restriction settings, and this issue was raised by our users as a red flag and became top priority in our features backlog.
Here are some of their comments:
Having discussed this further with the business we feel that your product is one that certainly fulfils a need in the market and does interests us. However, restricted access within a matter and branding the portal are vital so it may be slightly too early for us to go ahead with the product.
The consensus of opinion is that we are not ready to early adopt Workshare Transact because you are not able to restrict access to documents by individual or group (everyone gets everything) — we need to be able to control access to different docs by different people.
There was some reluctance to add other lenders to the deal — this is principally because there are usually 2 or 3 documents which are secret. They got round this by creating a placeholder in the checklist for the documents, and then circulating the relevant files by email. This is a temporary workaround — they would now like to kick out other lenders after the deal has closed and then add those files back in for the benefit of the client's future reference.
After getting this vital feedback from our users, I spoke to them directly to understand their pains, frustrations and expectations.
Once I collected this information, I started by writing down some scenarios to understand what should be covered in this story.
I normally create user stories using pieces of information from feedback. A lot of different scenarios get surfaced with this technique and it helps with listing the requirements for the feature later on.
Owen is the Associate Lawyer in charge of creating and managing the deal checklist for a large transaction. He needs to make sure the content of the checklist is up to date and that the right people have access to the right documents.
There are two documents which are highly confidential and relevant to only two people in this deal (Ben from Barclays and Marie from Google).
Owen needs to make sure these two documents have access restrictions applied before inviting other people to the deal.
Owen has created the restricted documents for Ben and Marie, and then kept adding other participants to the deal.
He then realises Claire from Google also needs access to the two restricted documents. He must be able to make changes to the access restrictions and add Claire to the document.
Gareth is an Attorney and he is responsible for the finance documents on the deal. He can't restrict access to the documents on the checklist because he is not an admin, but he needs to be aware of who has access to the documents he is working on.
Vanessa is a new Associate Lawyer and she is managing her first checklist. Everything is very overwhelming for her, she mistakenly invited everyone to the document "Shareholders' Agreement", but this document was supposed to be restricted to three participants on the deal.
Now it's too late. She has invited everyone and they have already accepted. She now needs to revoke these participants' access.
Christine is working on a top secret document together with Ryan. This document is extremely confidential and the name must be hidden as well as the content.
These simple scenario exercises gave me a very good idea of what the requirements and scope of the story would be like.
Sketches are always a good idea to test things quickly without getting attached to your design decisions.
I created several variations using paper to check if the interactions would make sense and sought internal feedback on them.
I find this technique really useful to get feedback on the big picture, without getting lost in details about the visual design itself.
After getting feedback at an early stage based on rough sketches, I created a flow to identify all the screens that would have to be designed.
For this story, we already had all our existing components from the Workshare pattern library, so there was no need to design anything from scratch.
I made a simple click through prototype using InVision to validate the solution before starting building anything.
After some iterations and feedback from the design team, developers and QA, the prototype was shared the with the users who had originally requested the access restrictions feature to be implemented.
In this session with the users, we discovered a few very important things:
We have always used Mixpanel to analyse and learn from our users' actions, allowing us to craft data-driven design solutions.
However, we often struggled to define the right metrics. Simply adding events to everything that's clickable helps in some circumstances — where we wanted to check usage of a certain element, for example — but this wasn’t the case for this project.
We learned that the best way to evaluate the impact of the UX changes, was by first understanding our goals, so that then we could choose metrics that helped us measure progress towards said goals.
The HEART Framework created by Digital Telepathy in collaboration with Google Ventures has helped a lot with that.
We are now in the process of developing the MVP.
The metrics below will be added, user testing will be done, and we will iterate until we've solved our users problems in the best possible manner.
Workshare
Mobile comments
Communication on the go.