How to Personify a Global Force in Business Litigation
Challenge
Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan is a global business litigation firm with 19 offices located in 10 different countries. With over 700+ attorneys, they are a key player in intellectual property litigation, having represented Fortune 500 clients such as Google, Samsung, Motorola, and Sony in some of the most important intellectual property cases of the decade. It was crystal clear that Quinn Emanuel needed a bold, new responsive site that left no doubt in the minds of those who visited that they were a “litigation powerhouse”. Discovery During the discovery phase we performed a site audit, utilized questionnaires, dug deep to do a competitive analysis, sent out branding surveys, conducted user interviews, developed personas, and crafted a list of suggested improvements based on the results. We found that despite their size and reputation as THE premier trial law firm, Quinn Emanuel’s site design was described as boring, bland, and uninspiring by the users we interviewed and was a very poor reflection of who Quinn Emanuel really is. Their old, clunky site that utilized flash graphics, rendering it useless on Apple devices. Not only that, but their website was not responsive and thus scared off any mobile traffic that lands on it. While they did have a separate mobile site, it was not user-friendly and had many of the same design problems as the desktop site.
Solution
UX Strategy Before applying any color schemes or picking fonts, we focused on a major part of what makes a site works or not: the site architecture. Simplifying the main navigation to include the most requested areas of the site enhanced the user’s experience since they could now access these areas with just one click. Wireframes enabled our UX team to layout content that should be on a page to make sure that everything made sense and flowed. These wireframes were key to planning how the content needed to be structured to work. We also researched the interpretations of different colors, how color was being used by their competitors and drew connections between different colors and the values that describe Quinn Emanuel. Based on our findings, we made color recommendations. We went through a similar process for fonts by researching, testing and evaluating hundreds of available fonts to make sure the one selected represented the Quinn Emanuel brand. Build Our approach during the design phase was to craft an experience that would engage the individual user, yet be fully functional to fill the needs of a multi-user base. To improve the design, we increased the amount of imagery on the site to make it more appealing visually and less text-overwhelming. We amped up the colors & typography to better represent the bold Quinn Emanuel brand and increased the font size on the site, making the text easier to read. Some 532-page designs later, we were ready for development in Umbraco. The development and integration phase for this project was where a lot of the heavy lifting happened. It was exciting to see the product that we had spent so much time researching, planning, and designing come to life in the browser. Since the site had been well-planned and strategized from the beginning, we didn’t encounter any “uh-oh” moments that would have required us to make major changes to the designs during development. Despite the redesigned site containing massive amounts of data, copy and images, our developers optimized everything so that page load times weren’t affected. We understand that attention to little details like these that have the ability to take a finished site from “good” to “wow”! Test & Launch During Quality Assurance, we poured over every inch of the developed site, double-checking every single page and section of the site to make sure it worked as it should, fixing bugs, and making final tweaks to perfect the experience. Finally, after months of hard work and preparation, it was time to launch! To make sure everything was in order, we ran through our pre-launch checklist to make sure the server was ready to go, the latest code was set to deploy, and that we had our team standing by to make sure the launch went smoothly. Once the decided upon day and time arrived, we made the site live and did another thorough QA to make sure everything was working properly. By handling all the details of the site launch, all Quinn Emanuel had to do was sit back and savor the satisfaction of seeing their redesigned site go live!
Results
Since their new site has launched, the feedback has been unanimous - visitors love the new site! The content on the homepage offers an exploratory experience, using different sections to highlight the most important sections of the site. This flows visitors through the rest of the site allowing them to experience each page. We truly balanced the look and feel part of design with the way each page worked to ensure optimal user experience.
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