Establishing a research-driven product development culture at a legal tech company

Learning about the legal industry

The Lupl UX team laid the groundwork for a research repository in Dovetail to store the research data and support analysis and sharing. They already had a few interview transcripts, notes, and recordings, making it easy and fast to learn about user needs and catch up with the industry domain.
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Additionally, we could immediately start using Lupl to become familiar with the existing features and logic. As part of the onboarding process, we had to learn about what others softwares lawyers are required to use and their competitors.

Getting in touch with lawyers

Access to the product's user base was crucial for this project.
We experimented with various recruitment channels based on the research questions:

1. We used external user research to gather input from a broader audience.
2. We directly recruited from the user base.
3. We established a process of recruiting among product users, using user analytics and reaching out to them directly.

The app’s dashboard where users can overview their projects (matters) and tasks.

Aligning with product roadmap

The planning and timing of research efforts are closely aligned with the product roadmap. We collaborate closely with the Product Manager, Design Team, and Development Leads to identify upcoming items on the product roadmap and plan larger research projects (such as concept testing and discovery research) accordingly.

We applied multiple research methods to answer our research questions.A few examples:

1. Discovery interviews to learn how lawyers manage their project budgets.
2. Prototype tests before developing new complex features.
3. Unmoderated navigation or first-click tests to validate the designs.

Building and maintaining the repository

Throughout our collaboration, all research data was uploaded, processed, and analysed in the research repository (Dovetail), creating a powerful database of user insights. Having an organised and standardised research repository allowed us to search previous research projects and review what we have already learned about a topic. This eliminated guesswork and served as the foundation for additional rounds of generative research.

Benefits of having a research repository

Generally, research repositories serves to organize data and facilitate effective communication of research insights to stakeholders. These evidence-backed insights help create more impactful research reports.

Additionally, our repository integrates with user feedback through API, allowing us to review and categorize each message and request. This provides us with an almost real-time overview of product feedback and feature requests.