Best Case Cloud & Client Portal
Overview
Role: Product Designer → Product Design Manager
Project: Redesign legacy products as a single, new cloud-based web application for law firms. Improve software robustness by providing a complete package of bankruptcy filing tools, case management features, and a mailbox for court notices. Optimize experience and product scalability by leading a team of designers through enhancements and the delivery of new features, including an integrated Client Portal that helps streamline the communication between debtors and their attorneys.
Type: Enterprise B2B
Legacy Products
Best Case
85%+ U.S. consumer bankruptcy cases are filed in Best Case, now known as “Best Case by Stretto” after Stretto acquired CINgroup in 2019. While this is often referred to as the “gold standard” for bankruptcy software, it requires users to purchase additional case management products to support their firm.
CINcompass
CINgroup’s IE-only alternative, cloud-based product provides similar functionality as Best Case by Stretto with integrated case management features (Tasks, Calendar, Email, etc). CINcompass is for the law firm “on the go,” providing a platform-agnostic and web-friendly solution to its users.
MyECFMail
A court noticing and calendar tool that integrates with Best Case by Stretto and reduces court notice processing times and court fees for law firms. Court notice attachments are automatically downloaded and important dates are automatically scheduled on the integrated calendar.
Phase 1: Integrated Court Notices and Calendar
Phase 2: MVP Launch of Best Case Cloud
Best Case Cloud was launched in December 2021 with approximately 128 early adopters that participated in our Beta. This initial release expanded on existing functionality some firms were already using in Court Notices and Calendar; Best Case cloud offers Court Notices and Calendar with the addition of federal bankruptcy forms and light-weight case management features. By the end of Q1 2022, Best Case Cloud had 196 firms actively subscribed.
Setting the Standard For Discovering and Solving Problems
ResearchOps “How We Do Research”
Centralized repository for research projects, insights, usability scores
Templates for various research studies, recruitment emails, surveys
Incentive guidelines and research calendar
Calendly to funnel qualified participants to schedule their session
DesignOps “How We Do Design”
Crazy 8s workshops, design brainstorming, “How Might We…”
Empathy Mapping, Journey Mapping, Service Blueprints
UX/UI audit templates, Figma component and asset libraries
Documentation for design standards and guidelines
Our main objective in 2022 was to achieve two key milestones: onboarding 1,000 new firms to Best Case Cloud and maintaining a retention rate of at least 85%
Using Research and Data Analytics to Measure the Experience
To understand the user experience of our product, my team used Pendo to segment and recruit high-frequency users for 1:1 interviews. We also launched a UMUX-Lite usability survey (now a standard quarterly survey) to understand Best Case Cloud’s perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use.
“Loading time is unbearably slow. Navigation is unbearably slow. Website freezes. Website unavailable. Frankly, I am surprised cloud was even released. And to think, Best Case is even attempting to charge for it.”
Performance and Reliability in the System Emerge as Common Points of Friction in UX
“Let’s say I’m entering paystubs, it’ll just kind of freeze and then says, do you want to wait or quit?”
“You enter in 50 creditors, and there is an additional 15-20 seconds between each one, it kind of slows things down…I’d love to be able to get in there and knock them out super fast.”
“What used to take me 10 minutes now takes me an hour. I know it’s not my internet speed.”
“I can’t adjust my flat rate for my legal fee, the only thing I can do is to make my time more efficient.”
“I would save it, and then come back to it, and the data entry wasn’t saved.”
“You’ll start inputting information… click Save… but it won’t even show you what you just did. And I’m like really, did I accidentally cancel? Did I save it? Then you wait 5, 6, 7, 8… hopefully, and it pops up.”
Focusing on Core Issues in the User Experience
Improving Visibility of System Status with Post-Workflow FEedback Toasts
Notifications and Guided Workflows to Help Users Update Their Payment Information
Admin-Level Permissions To Give Firms More Control Over Users
Improved Workflows for Adding and Managing Clients and Cases
Continuing to Enable Empathy With Cross-Functional Teams
All-Hands Cognitive Walkthrough
Some stakeholders mentioned never having logged into our cloud product, not knowing at all what our users were experiencing. My team organized a vertical-wide “Click-a-Thon” to simulate many concurrent users interacting with the product at the same time. We took a cognitive walkthrough approach by building lessons that provided instructions on which core tasks to complete. Following each task, participants were surveyed on their experience. Over 40 employees participated in this activity.
Using the data from our survey and group debrief sessions, we were able to hone in on specific product areas that had the worst performance ratings or the longest task completion times. This helped the greater team build empathy around what we were hearing from users and helped provide a firsthand experience to our software’s problems.
Client Advisory Board
Performance is an area that we discuss often at our Client Advisory Board meetings. We have 2 board groups — both comprised of 5 attorneys — and they meet once a month to provide feedback on our software, help us learn more about the bankruptcy field, and validate roadmap ideas.
These meetings are open for anyone to attend, so we typically have at least 1 person from each department listening on the call.
Prioritizing performance and core experience issues set back plans to develop a data conversion tool for legacy users. Therefore, we only had 450 firms subscribed with a 92% retention rate by EOY, falling short of our goal to onboard 1,000 new firms.
By Q2 2023, Best Case Cloud had 500 firms actively subscribed. At the beginning of June, we launched our self-service conversion tools for legacy users to start transitioning to the cloud. Within 1 month of launching these tools, about 350 firms migrated their data to the cloud, resulting in a total of 850 actively subscribed firms.
Phase 3: Intake Questionnaire for Client Portal
My Role as Product Design Manager
Scale UX Practice
ResearchOps
DesignOps
Hiring and Resource Allocation
Coach and Mentor
Performance Goals and Weekly Check-ins
UX Methods and Principles
Domain and User Expert
Foster Cross-Functional Collaboration
Data-driven Decision Making
Roadmap Planning and Estimation
Design-Thinking Workshops
Empower and Motivate
Peer-to-peer Collaboration
Design Studio Workshops
In-person Team Building
Take My Team’s Word For It…
I’ve had the privilege to work alongside Sam for a year at Stretto as a product designer. Although he’s my manager, I consider him more of a mentor and friend. From the moment I joined his team, he has given me the tools to succeed and thrive within the company—empowering me to learn, share my ideas, and achieve personal career goals I never thought possible. Sam possesses many great qualities—he’s patient, kind, supportive, but most of all he is an excellent communicator and presents his ideas with tact and attentiveness. He has challenged our entire team to become better UX designers—guiding us every step of the way. I’m grateful for everything I’ve learned from him and I can honestly say Sam is the most influential UX leader I’ve ever worked with.
I worked under Sam during my time at Stretto as a Product Designer. Besides being both a passionate and meticulous designer, Sam is a caring, patient, and thoughtful manager, marked with a wonderful sense of humor and a strong work ethic that pervades his team. I am privileged that I had the opportunity to work on multiple projects with him, and under his guidance, I felt empowered with his support to grow in various design skills that I often felt insecure or lacking in. He's helped me work through gnarly design problems and given me insights that expanded my scope of design thinking--and I've gained different lessons from his feedback that I will take with me in my design career. I'm incredibly thankful for the time that we were able to work together.