Lexis Create for Microsoft Office

LexisNexis’ Create for Microsoft Office is a plug-in tool in MS Word that streamlines legal professionals' drafting capabilities to correct mistakes, compile documents and cite references clearly and easily - limiting risk for them and building confidence in their documents as a result. It being a MS Word native app, there were a lot of technical limitations and requirements that added necessary complications to the project. All in, the scope was to make something that was ubiquitous to the platform but also scalable to products like MS Teams, and Outlook - building a holistic journey for the user through apps that they spend most of their day in, and merging the content from LexisNexis seamlessly.

⭡89% increase in tool preference

⭡300% increase in DAU base

We intermittently surveyed users throughout the redesign process with interview testing and strategic surveys to test if we were going in the right direction. The baseline question ‘On a scale of 1-10, how likely are you to make this part of your daily document drafting workflow’ was asked throughout. Starting at a 4-5/10, we moved the needle to 8.7/10 in user testing. Throughout this project, we cast our net wider to include more users, absorbing new features that other tools were doing, therefore absorbing the userbase, and expanding our footprint to include the US as well as the UK, which meant we had to include flexibility in the types of legal professionals we catered to. The US is about 80% litigation law and 20% transactional - whereas the UK is almost the polar opposite of that.

Project planning was difficult with so many stakeholders, and shifting expectations but the direction from UX was straightforward - redesign the platform with a scalable, reusable design system that was rooted in research, user data and established heuristic design patterns and principles. It started with understanding the current workflows, and then rebuilding based off the needs and finessing the direction with user feedback and extensive testing to build a powerful tool that allowed the flexibility and scalability to achieve the business goals of increasing the user adoption across the company’s global product footprint.

We found through qualitative data in interviews, and quantitative data in metrics and surveys that simply, users get lost. Users weren’t understanding what the ask was, what the value was - and in most cases, didn’t believe what we were capable of because of the UI didn’t match the capabilities of the tool. There were a few simple tweaks or easy fixes - adding a way back, or being able to highlight content and show relevant actions that are available to that content.