GOAL
To advance the AM Legal Code Library past its competitors’ standards through completing a full redesign and expanding their feature offerings.
PROJECT
AM Legal Code Library
CLIENT
American Legal Publishing
PROJECT SUMMARY
American Legal Publishing hosts, publishes and distributes many county, city and municipality codes and ordinances across the United States. They came to us in 2018 in need of a major overhaul to modernize their look, offer new up-to-date features to their users and stay competitive against others in their industry.
THE ORIGINAL PRODUCT
The core team for this project was myself, two developers and the president of APAX. My roles spanned as Researcher, UX/UI Design, PM and QA as the project developed. The client came to us with a specific competitor that they wanted to be more competitive with, and it was our job to figure out how to make that happen.
The first step after our initial kickoff meeting was for me to become familiar with AM Legal’s existing website, their main competitors’ sites and the industry itself. After ramping up and performing the initial competitive research, I created a feature comparison spreadsheet complete with a list of features that they were lacking, any strategic gaps that could be identified and notes about potential solutions for each line item. After presenting that deliverable to the client, it opened up a more detailed discussion for specific feature development and prioritization/order of operations. I continued to work with the client as we scoped out a timeline and I dove into wireframes for the redesign, and then eventually focused on the more in-depth features.
That first quarter of work got us all of our competitive research, requirements gathering and sign-off on the initial wireframes. After that sign-off, I was able to demo them to the AM Legal sales team for some rounds of internal feedback. They went really well, and I was able to transition them to high-fidelity mock-ups after that and pass the screens off to our development team.
We entered the development phase on time and on track, but realized fairly quickly how much scope some of the larger features added. We had presented and designed new advanced features such as a much better keyword search, advanced filters and search results, version comparison, navigational updates and more. The big lesson learned here was just how easily scope creep can happen when a client wants everything that you present to them. The client’s timeline for this project was originally nine months, and about a quarter before that deadline, we knew that we were behind on the development side. I was the first to raise that red flag by looking at the team’s Jira board, resources and each developer’s average velocity. I went to Keith, our President and Project Manager, with my concern and a quick spreadsheet I had put together to calculate how far behind we were, and we tracked that over the next three months until the proposed release date. Keith was the client-facing coordinator in this scenario, and I worked behind the scenes to continually update my estimate spreadsheet and help the team prioritize certain development.
My last main role of this project was Quality Assurance. An APAX Project Manager and I had done some internal analyses to present to leadership that we needed to hire full-time QA talent, but until that member of the team was hired and I was able to pass off the project to them, I served as QA for the team and created some in-depth manual spreadsheets to test some of the larger features.
“You really killed it with the demo to AM Legal’s sales team. I think we should look for ways to get you in front of clients more often.”
In the end, we are very proud of the redesigned and revamped Code Library. It is more modern, more user friendly, the client and sales team have gotten very good feedback from their users and the product is a valid competitor in the industry. Below are some screenshots from the final designs: