Digital Product Design Making Business Filings a Pleasure to Manage
CorpNet is a corporate compliance and business formation service. Their experts prepare, monitor and manage the filings to form your corporation or LLC. Once formed, they monitor required filing deadlines and recommend additional filings to support your business as it grows – for example they take the necessary steps if you expand your business to another state.
They came to me with an existing tool that their users complained was cumbersome, caused them to overlook key notices and was falling behind their competitors in functionality, easy of use and branding. I proposed an initial phase of user research consisting of a series of interviews to form a better understanding of CorpNet’s audience and their goals. Through conversations with stakeholders, review of their analytics data and a competitive landscape analysis I formed a deep understanding of the challenges.
From there I created used stories and began sketching concepts. Creating a tool which would serve the user with one business entity to manage and the user with 100’s to manage was a major challenge. Additionally, as CorpNet partners, some users need an additional layer of management and commission data. To support the first time, single company user, I recommended a homepage that greatly increased the focus on the initial formation process and congratulated the user for accomplishing the launch of their corporation.
The earlier version of the tool was focused around the concept of orders – one time transactions based on specific filings. Throughout the new design, my concept was to transform their service into an ongoing, proactive tool to strengthen client relationships. To this end, I created notifications as the central feature to prompt the user to prepare for any upcoming filings or recommend additional steps to improve compliance. This helped protect user business and provided a path for CorpNet to sell an increased service level.
Starting a business is a challenge by any measure and I wanted the user experience to reflect that and show each company as something more than the summary of its filing. I made the screen representing each business dramatically more significant and used visual indicators to highlight its status through the filing process and overall add much more structure.
After working through the wireframe process, I refreshed the branding with a new user interface design. The new look and feel is an elegant, contemporary evolution of CorpNet’s previous style. While using an updated design language it uses a conservative palette and limited graphical elements to reinforce the traditional aspects of the legal profession.
Overall the newly launched overhaul represents a dramatic improvement in CorpNet’s ability to service their users online. It opens up the ability to launch their partner program and generates new excitement from the positive interactions users will have with the enhanced site.