SUMMIZE

This approach helped me a lot. Tom was a lawyer and his idea had come from his own frustrations. As a user this gave me lots of insight and I rapidly iterated on the wires until the flow felt quick, simple, easy and understandable.

Tom knew some legal firms who would be willing to help me out with user research. I drafted some research objectives and open questions and ran these past Tom to check I was on the right track. I got my laptop, cameras and microphone and headed to the offices to interview eight lawyers.

The first parts of the session were open questions, probing around the challenges they face day to day in dealing with contracts. It was incredibly insightful (user research always is) but I had so little idea of how lawyers and legal firms operate that it felt even more powerful.

For the second part of the session I showed them a clickable prototype and asked them to complete a series of realistic tasks. Remarkably, the prototype hung together well giving us clear direction on what worked and didn't work with regards to flows. It was clear from the sessions that some features wouldn't be used whilst others needed dialling up in prominence.

Working in a startup isn't straightforward; you need to wear many hats. At the same time as trying to work out the UX and conduct the research I had to work out the branding and marketing assets.

The biggest constraint was always time. I was working in my evenings to get through the work and had to come to terms that my design decisions weren't cast in stone, we could revisit. It was more important to move fast and cover a lot of ground, I could tweak the branding later, revisit a layout, iterate a flow.

Tom and Dave were working all hours to build relationships, architect the software. I would take half an afternoon off here and there to go meet lawyers, test prototypes, gather more research. It was a really exciting time and it really was never clear how it would all end up.

Tom was able to secure funding which enabled him and Dave to go full time. They started to hire some developers to help take the load off Dave. I recommended my good friend Andy Isherwood, a true full stack dev. We'd worked together at the BBC on Playtime Island and he is simply the best all rounder I've worked with.

Things really started to ramp up for me, I needed to supply designs for development to build whilst I was still working out the visual design of the software. I'd work a full day, go home and spend time with my children before sitting down in front of my laptop to start designing layouts for four hungry developers.

And it's brilliant to see. They hired really, really well. Rich Somerfield came in as CTO and was utterly brilliant. His approach as CTO is the best I've seen. Zoe came and drove the marketing from a couple of visits to the site a month to the thousands they are getting now. In Andy they had the best all rounder you could get.

It shows the power of a team, and when you get the balance just right, it shows what can be achieved.