Mistake #1 - Lack of Customer Insight Driving UX Design

Usability and UX are key components of customer experience. Understanding what users do and why, and translating that insight into high quality solutions that work seamlessly across devices, is the key to customer-centric site design.

How can you design a solution if you don't understand your target audience, their needs and motivations for using your Law Firm website?

There is still a surprising lack of focus on customer insight, with many Law Firms reliant upon web analytics data (quantitative) but lacking a process to capture direct customer feedback (qualitative).

This compromises design because the output isn't necessarily aligned with user needs, creating friction in the process. A good example is form design for mobile devices; analytics could show good checkout or form conversion but user research reveals customer frustration as forms don't display the most appropriate keypad based on field type. For example: email field doesn't default to email keypad.

STRATEGY RECOMMENDATION: Conduct UX research to validate new updates

When introducing new or updating existing website features, conduct UX research to validate user needs and identify points of friction. This can be done using a variety of low-cost, scalable methods:

- Online survey to registered/opt-in customers (this allows you to ask quality and quantity questions)

- Remote video testing using demographic targeting to get the appropriate sample - this is all remote unmoderated user testing, it allows you to see a users screen, whilst they work through tasks and give audio feedback

- User panel (typically comprises brand loyalists) - by creating a research panel of users, you can reach out to them to ask them feedback on the site

- Persistent feedback forms on the website such as website intercepts such as Hotjar and Intercom

Mistake #2 - No Personalized Approach to User Journeys and Content

Online audiences are heterogeneous; they comprise a variety of different user types and behaviors. Many Law Firm websites fail to recognize the differences between these users and provide a uniform website experience with the same content for everyone.

Personalization has been shown to increase website conversions. According to research from Dynatrace, marketers report an average uplift in online sales of 19% from personalizing web experiences.

A one size-fits all content strategy fails to address each audience’s unique needs and barriers to purchase. Personalization tailors content to suit each person and helps design teams tackle potential barriers in the user journey

STRATEGY RECOMMENDATION: Segment Your Customers

Find a way to segment your customers or clients based on their demographic profile and/or browsing and purchasing behavior, then tailor content and promotions to each audience.

Mistake #3 - Failure to understand device specific behaviour

The tasks we perform and the way we use a website can vary across devices. For example, searching for local store information is a common mobile behavior and predominantly this is carried out on smartphones.

The default pattern for store location is to enter an address and then retrieve a list of stores based on proximity.  However, location detection on mobile devices is accurate and faster, reducing the cognitive effort for customers.

To understand how people are using the website on different devices, you need to spend time analyzing browsing behavior and using web analytics data to discover use journey flows and page engagement metrics. By doing this, you can segment based on device and isolate patterns that only apply to a specific device class.

STRATEGY RECOMMENDATION: Use Analytics For Customer Journey Analysis

Ensure you have your analytics tools configured to track different browsing activities, including:

- Event tracking for key actions like video views, downloads etc.

- Scroll and heat map tracking for page engagement

- Apply device class segmentation (desktop, mobile, tablet) and compare behaviors.

- Identify ‘pinch points’ per device class, where performance for this device class is significantly worse than for other devices.

Feed this back into the user research to get voice of customer feedback to understand why performance might be poorer, then use this insight to inform your design process to make changes that are tailored to the device usage.

Mistake #4 - Not Creating Use Case Models to Prioritize Page Content

Use case models align with personas/segmentation. They build out a hierarchy of business requirements for each user type, with each use case rated using a consistent prioritization scoring.

Typically a use case looks like the following:

As a ______, I want to ______

For example:

As a client, I want to search for a personal injury lawyer that I want to hire.

It uses a hierarchy with a high-level requirement (“I want to search for a Law Firm specialization”), which then breaks down into more granular requirements (“I want to be able to search on any page”, “I want to filter my search results”, etc.)

By mapping all the use cases for a webpage or piece of content, you build a picture of what the design has to satisfy. By prioritizing use cases based on business/client need and impact, you provide a clear brief to your chosen web designer for which components must take precedence, helping ensure designs align with user needs.

STRATEGY RECOMMENDATION: Create a Simple Framework For Building a Use Case

Follow these steps:

- Define the actors for the new development e.g. customers, admins etc.

- Map high-level use cases to each actor e.g. As a Client, I want to _____

- For each use case, break this down into more granular requirements

- Agree on your prioritization criteria (ensure it’s robust and classifications are distinct and objective i.e. don’t make everything a ‘must have’!)

- Rank each use case based on these criteria

- Agree on an ‘MVP’ view or Minimum Viable Product view – what are the minimum use case expectations to be able to launch this?

- Finally, summarize and brief your User Experience Team, on the case model

Mistake #5 - Inefficient Digital Asset Management Impacting Page Speed

Page speed is an important component of Customer Experience. Not only do slow loading pages reduce customer satisfaction, they also impact conversion, as bounce rates tend to increase as page speed slows down. Furthermore, Google has made page speed an integral part of its mobile algorithm, so poorly optimized mobile pages will send negative quality signals.

Below are common problems for Law Firm websites:

- Failing to serve assets appropriate to the device requesting them g. images not optimized for web, where the file size is larger than required

- Relying on the browser to resize images – the browser still has to load the full image, then check the dimensions you want and resize it locally

- Serving large files to slow connections; assets like video files degrade on slow connections, so you should use device detection to determine when it’s appropriate to serve the content

On mobile every millisecond counts, so even images that are adding 100kb will have a significant impact on performance.

STRATEGY RECOMMENDATION: Select a page speed testing tool and set-up a regular process for page speed monitoring.

Then follow these steps:

- Export the data into Excel and create a page speed chart

- Monitor the chart daily to identify any sudden peaks and troughs

- Liaise with your webops/dev team to run diagnostic checks on poor performing pages

- Identify potential issues and create tickets to resolve them

- Establish a process of page speed monitoring around new releases (minor and major) to measure impact of site changes on performance.

Mistake #6 - Using Site Wide Rather Than Page Centric UX Patterns

A classic UX or User Experience mistake that Law Firms often make, is to create a design pattern that is intended to improve the customer experience and help support business goals, but then apply it uniformly across the site instead of thinking how it needs to adapt based on page level use cases.

It’s important to consider contextual relevance in UX design, ensuring that content components are designed appropriate to the context of their use i.e. where are they being used in the user journey and what is most helpful to the client?

STRATEGY RECOMMENDATION: Ensure you design use cases

Before applying a new UX pattern to your Law Firm website, review which pages it’s applicable to and do the following

- Create a use case model for each page – how will users want to use this pattern on each page?

- Compare the use cases to your default version – does it satisfy all pages?

- Where there is a gap between the default UX and the page level requirement, adapt the design to align

- Ensure tracking is in place to measure customer behaviour and then compare performance across each page type.

Mistake #7 - Not Ensuring Web Analytics Can Track Page Level Success Metrics

To know whether or not your Law Firm website is delivering a high quality of customer experience, you need to have a set of KPIs to measure performance.

However, out the box web analytics installations typically have measurement gaps. They’ll be adept at measuring session data but won’t be configured to capture specific page interactions, for example capturing video plays and whitepaper downloads.

If we take the example of a download on your Law Firm website, typically this occurs via a landing page with a short form and ‘Download’ CTA or Call-To-Action button. Default analytics will capture the landing page URL sessions, and in-page analysis will show sampled page interactions, but there won’t be accurate tracking of field entry, form completion and submission.

If the form has a high abandonment rate, why is this? If we know which field is driving the most exits, or returning a high volume of errors, we can start to understand why performance is poor.

This is where analytics configuration helps improve your measurement of customer experience. By using techniques like event tracking, you can capture page interactions for non-standard elements, as well as using standard reports for metrics like time on page, bounce rate and % exit.

STRATEGY RECOMMENDATION: Set granular KPIs for specific site pages and user journeys.

You can make usability/UX a measurement dimension of everything. Let's take the example of site search:

- Search depth

- Click through rate (CTR) from search results

- Percentage of zero results searches

- Bounce rate for search results page

- Conversion rate from search sessions

These measures build a picture of how successful search is at engaging and converting clients.

Once you've defined the KPIs you want to measure, ensure your web analytics tools are configured to capture this data and present it in an accessible format.

Mistake #8 - Failure To Regularly Analyse

Performance Based on Success Metrics

Once you’ve established the KPIs to measure performance against, you need a process in place to ensure these are regularly analyzed. This doesn’t mean generating a report and thinking ‘job done’; reporting is not analysis!

It means agreeing a reporting cycle but ensuring that each time the report is generated, somebody is interrogating the data to ask ‘why?’ when KPIs change. For example, when measuring goal completion rate for email sign-up, if the completion rate increases sharply week-on-week, what analysis is done to understand what has caused this?

A common mistake is submitting business reports, flagging good and bad performance but having no explanation of what has happened or data to validate the change.

STRATEGY RECOMMENDATION: Define a regular review process

Put a process in place to analyze KPI reports and provide data-driven insights into why performance is changing. Consider the following:

- Appoint an owner for each report

- Ensure there is an experienced web analyst supporting the report owners

- Agree variance thresholds for each KPI above/below which analysis is required

- When a KPI exceeds the threshold, report owner runs an initial diagnostic

- If the report owner can’t explain the change, escalate to the web analyst for deeper analysis & interrogation

- Include a section in each report for ‘Business insight & learning’ – once analysis is complete, attach findings and summarize key learning for the business.

By adopting this process, your marketing meetings will become more productive because performance fluctuations can be explained using data and learning from the analysis can be shared across your Law Firm.

Mistake #9 - Lack of Investment in Tools to Measure Usability and UX

If you don’t have budget available to invest in the right tools, your Law Firm's customer experience analysis will be compromised. We’ve seen Law Firms happy to spend thousands on paid media but baulk at hundreds of dollars for UX software tool licenses.

To build a complete picture of customer experience, you need to be able to measure and analyze your customer’s behavior throughout the website. This requires multiple data sets:

- Behavioral - what they do, when and where

- Emotional - why they do things, what they like and dislike and why

- Functional - what they click on, what paths they follow, where they exit

- Rational - how they respond based on what your Law Firm website presents them

To help you build this picture, you need to use multiple tools that help answer different questions:

- What are people doing? > web analytics session and user ID data

- What are their browsing paths and barriers? > session replay, scroll and heat mapping

- Why are they doing it? > customer surveys, video testing

Mistake #10 - Not Applying Conversion Rate Optimization

Techniques To Improve Results

By applying the 9 previous principles, you should be evolving towards a customer-centric approach to your Law Firm's website design, where you better understand what clients want, need, and how to deliver this across multiple devices.

But don’t think your work is over yet!

This is just the start. A common mistake Law Firms make is to launch new designs and then move on to the next project.

As long as the KPIs are positive, the risk is to think it’s working well.

However, you should apply the core principle of conversion rate optimization (CRO) to all site development; the only way to optimize performance effectively is to interactively test your design to discover how you can further improve results.

You need to embed a culture of test + learn to ensure that you optimize your Law Firm website to learn what works best.

This includes testing:

- What brand messages to communicate

- What service elements to promote

- How to use reassurance and persuasion messaging

- What content to use and how much of it

- How to be creative

If you don’t understand the problem, how can you fix it properly?

To improve big numbers, we need to look beyond the campaign; to improve small numbers, we need to optimize the design of your Law Firm website. 

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