Sarah Williams | Design Leader

Pro Bono Engagement

Personalized pro bono to increase access to justice.

The objective

Identify and implement improvements to increase volunteer engagement on Paladin’s platform.

Company
Paladin

My Role
The sole designer in charge of managing the project, timeline, activities and executing research and design; in close collaboration with product, business and engineer partners.

Timeline
Q2 – Q3 2022

Background

What is Paladin?

Paladin is the go-to platform for connecting the pro bono community and empowering legal teams to do more pro bono, more efficiently.

Paladin’s pro bono platform connects Legal Service Organizations (LSOs) with law firms, enabling legal professionals to fulfill their pro bono obligations. However, low volunteer engagement has been a critical challenge, affecting the platform’s value and revenue. This project aimed to identify and implement improvements to enhance volunteer engagement on Paladin’s platform.

Paladin audiences and value wheel
The problem

Low value for all users

When volunteer engagement is low, Legal Service Organizations (LSOs) are less motivated to post opportunities, and law firms receive less value, leading to reduced subscriptions.

Key hypotheses:

1. Insufficient opportunities on the platform.

2. Lack of diverse and broad opportunities.

3. Difficulty searching and filtering the opportunity list.

4. Opportunities not personalized based on user preferences or interests.

Discovery

Uncovering the root cause

I conducted a series of studies with users and non-users to refine our hypotheses.

I employed multiple research methodologies, including generative and evaluative studies, to collect data from lawyers and legal professionals across the country.

Usability testing
Evaluated whether legal professionals could find relevant pro bono opportunities.

Screenshot of usability test from Usertesting.com

1-on-1 interviews
Explored how lawyers determine the suitability of pro bono opportunities and what makes them express interest.

Low fidelity wireframes used for 1-on-1 generative interviews

Research confirmed that low engagement was due to usability issues and a lack of relevant information.

Key takeaways

Unintuitive search and filter
Users struggle to locate and use current features.

Need better prioritization
Users expect opportunities to be prioritized based on their preferences.

Lacking information
Users need quick answers to critical questions: (1) Is it in my area of expertise? (2) Do I have the right skills and licensure? (3) Does it fit within my schedule?

Timing information is too vague
Users require more specific details about time commitments.

Concepting

Prioritizing solutions

From testing, we confirmed our biggest opportunity to increase engagement was automatically matching legal professionals with relevant opportunities.

Now that we had a better understanding of why volunteer engagement was low, I created project goals to help prioritize an initial set of improvements.

Project goals

Increase personalization
Help lawyers quickly find relevant opportunities.

Build confidence toward action
Provide enough information for legal professionals to confidently express interest.

Prioritized solutions
Improve search and filter

Enhance search capabilities for better usability.

Improve content and hierarchy

Collect and prominently display key information that is most important to lawyers.

Leverage relevance algorithms

Create a new capability to automatically personalize opportunities based on preferences.

How might we statements and a concept reference for each
Final design

Customer-centered innovation

I worked with product and engineer partners to define a feature roadmap to incrementally launch our product improvements.

We started with low effort, high impact projects, first, to deliver value and learn from data where to continuously improve.

I was also able to introduce new branding and a design system in parallel to strengthen brand credibility.

Improve search and filter

Helps laywers find opportunities they are interested in, quickly.

Before: Unsophisticated and unintuitive

  • Low visibility
  • Hard to use with limited functionality
  • Slow response time
  • Not responsive or accessible
Image of old opportunity list with unintuitive search and filter.
After: High performing and usable

  • Increased visibility and prominence
  • Improved usability
  • Improved performance powered by Algolia
  • Responsive and accessibility friendly
Image of new opportunity list with improved search and filter.
Improve content and hierarchy

Ensures lawyers have the information they need to confidently express interest.

Before: Confusing and vague

  • Opportunity forms did not capture critical information needed
  • Key information was buried in opportunity details
  • Opportunity lists and details had poor content hierarchy and design
Old pro bono opportunity form with poor hierarchy and visual design.
Image of old opportunity details screen with poor hierarchy and visual design.
After: Clear and guiding experiences

  • Improved usability of forms to capture critical information
  • Prioritized information across opportunity list and details
  • Improved content hierarchy and design
Image of new opportunity form content hierarchy and design.
Image of new opportunity details with improved hierarchy and visual design.
Leverage relevance algorithms

Proactively displays pro bono opportunities that match users' preferences across experiences.

Before: Inconsistent and unintelligent system

  • Lack of parity across pro bono lists and digest emails
  • Required users to manually refine their pro bono lists
Old opportunity list and weekly digest with inconsistent use of personalization.
After: Reliably intelligent system

  • Tailored pro bono lists to preferences across all experiences
  • Used custom ranking of preferences for more nuanced control
New opportunity list and weekly digest with personalization parity.
Video of user viewing their weekly digest email, clicking on a pro bono opportunity to view details, and expressing interest.
Measure

Understanding our impact

We tracked key metrics to confirm that more lawyers were successfully finding and expressing interest in volunteer opportunities.

These product enhancements also helped us lay the groundwork for additional innovation to grow and scale the product.

Impact

Within 3 months post-launch...

0 %

Increase in total volunteer sign-ups

0 %

Improved conversion from search to sign-up

0 %

Users created a new opportunity in under 10 minutes

More work

Previous project
Walmart

Associate Listening

Next project
Verizon

Service Transparency

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