Web Filing BC

A multi-year, multi-phase project that brings all the steps of completing BC land title applications to the web.

Team

Research and Development, Engineering, Practice and Policy, Customer Operations, Communications

My Role

Product Design Lead, User Research, Strategy

End Users

Lawyers, Paralegals, Notaries, Land Surveyors

Project Outline

Legal professionals such as lawyers, paralegals and notaries file land title applications to LTSA (Land Title and Survey Authority of British Columbia). These applications include transactions that involve interest in a land, such as the registration of a mortgage against a property. Today this process is done by filling complex PDF forms and submitting them to the Land Title office. To streamline the filing process and develop a user-centred web application, LTSA has launched a product that brings all the steps of the filing process to the web called Web Filing LTSA. I was part of the foundations for the project and contributed throughout the first two years of its development.

Business requirements

Web Filing is built in multiple phases. On this page, I’ll focus on one of these phases that involves developing the online forms and the Package page. The Package page was one of the first pages I designed. On this page, users can edit, view and electronically sign LTSA forms. This page is a core page of the system and was challenging to design since two different users types use it. Paralegals and notaries use it to complete and manage LTSA forms, while lawyers use it to review and electronically sign the completed forms.

Understanding the Challenge

The land title is a fast-paced industry. Legal professionals are often under strict deadlines to complete and submit applications that comply with the Land Title Act to avoid legal charges. Therefore, filling out applications correctly and efficiently is key to them. In the current system, PDF forms don’t have enough help and instructions, which causes errors and confusion in the application process for legal professionals. Legal professionals have to refer to a multi-page guide or call the LTSA for help to understand complex forms. This can slow down the filing process and, therefore, put their career at risk. Also, the portal is not mobile responsive and requires access to a desktop computer, which makes it harder for legal professionals to complete their work remotely.

Design Process

I followed an iterative design process to help me continuously improve and polish my designs.

Research Methods

  • Workshops: To better understand the challenges customers face, I conducted a series of customer consultations. I prepared the consultation plans and met with LTSA customers to better understand their workflows and pain points. I interviewed lawyers, notaries, and paralegals and captured their input for user journey maps and personas. With the data gathered throughout customer consultations, I created reports and presented suggestions and solutions to improve existing features.

  • Personas: I used personas to build empathy with users and identify what they need. I wanted to focus on expert legal professionals and users new to the field. I referred to different user groups and validated personas with the customer during customer consultation sessions to update and verify the information with users.
  • Journey Maps: I used the journey map to identify, user’s thought process, frustrations, questions, and concerns, and opportunities to improve. I facilitated various workshops and gathered user’s input about different processes involved in the land title industry.

Sketches

Designing for Web Filing involves a deep understanding of the land title and legal practice industry. I studied various business materials, interviewed users and stakeholders, and worked with the Product Owner to better understand the problem space. I leveraged user research insights to create the experience strategy and initial designs. This work involved close collaboration with the UX team, the business stakeholders and the engineering team.

Improvements

Improved the NPS on the Package page. The package page started with a design that had redundancy in its Information Architecture. With usability evaluation, I learnt that the users need users more distinct Call To Actions. .awyers needed a way to access applications to electronically sign them without getting overloaded with detailed information about the applications. I redesigned the content hierarchy on this page to make it more clear to users. I used a combination of utility dropdowns with specific Call To Actions and checkboxes for actions that can be applied to multiple documents.

Visual Design and UI

I collaborated with the UI designer to improve the accessibility and usability of the LTSA style guide. I promoted improvements to make the style guide closer to AA compliance. In addition, I created accessibility guidelines such as guidelines for keyboard behaviour for Web Filing. I initiated the effort to evolve the LTSA style guide into a design system by clearly documenting rules and principles and creating reusable patterns instead of creating new ones every time. This improved the development process significantly and led to the design of an accessible design system.

Validating Assumptions

The team had an assumption that lawyers and paralegals use the Package page the same way. I ran usability evaluations to confirm this assumption. The usability evaluations helped the team understand how users use this page and reduced development effort and cost by creating a design that was validated with end-users.

Validation

I lead various usability evaluation sessions to access products to understand any usability issues before moving to production. I wanted to make sure the language and content used on the interface are meaningful to the users. I created test plans, task scripts and recruited participants for the study. I created reports and presented findings with suggestions to improve designs to the engineering and business team.

Acceptance Testing

I reviewed the designs for compliance with business and UX specifications.

Outcome

  • My designs reduced customer support calls by 25%
  • I designed a strategy to simplify navigation which reduced user errors and made the development process faster
  • I created foundations of an accessible design system