Someone at the firm built a prototype in an afternoon, or a working application in a few months. It does exactly what they need it to do – from a functionality perspective – but can users really use it?
Some law firms are prototyping in-house with AI and often moving directly into implementation. What’s missing is the step in between – the one where someone asks whether the application is intuitive for the end users.
Knox Design Strategy advises law firms on the user experience of their internal prototypes, applications in development, and those already live. The work is advisory and agile: review, testing, and prioritized recommendations. This work happens alongside the teams prototyping and building the application, and the end users it serves.
Workflow Analysis – A step-by-step account of what users are trying to accomplish and how they do it now, including the workarounds that never made it into documentation. Applications tend to get built around the workflow as described. This maps the workflow as performed and defines an improved one for the application to support.
User Experience Review – A structured evaluation of what exists now, whether it’s a new prototype or an application already in daily use. Knox Design Strategy works through the application the way its users do, measured against how the work gets done, and documents where it helps, where it gets in the way, and which issues should be addressed first.
Usability Testing – Moderated sessions with the firm’s users – the attorneys, paralegals, and staff who will live in the application. Knox Design Strategy writes the test plan, runs the sessions, and reports what happened. Watching five people succeed or fail at the same task turns opinion into evidence.
Information Architecture – How content is organized and labeled, how users move between sections to find it, and what they encounter once they arrive on a screen. Findability is where most internal applications break down. The content is there; whether a user can reach it, and how quickly, depends on the structure.
Production Readiness – What has to be true before an internal build goes firmwide. Knox Design Strategy assesses whether the prototype is ready and what’s missing. Sometimes that’s a short list of fixes before it goes live. Sometimes it’s more than that.
This practice starts where the others stop. Most of Knox Design Strategy’s work happens before anything is built – defining the problem, mapping the workflow, writing the requirements. This one comes in once something exists. The application becomes the discovery instrument. It’s faster to learn what a workflow needs by watching people work through a running version of it than by asking them to describe a hypothetical one.
The starting question is the same one that’s always been the starting question. How does the firm do this now, and where does it break down? Process improvement is usually the real goal – the application is how the improvement gets delivered.
Knox Design Strategy was designing bespoke digital applications for law firms – intranets, knowledge centers, client portals, extranets, matter intake systems, claims databases – long before AI-assisted prototyping. The questions haven’t changed. Who is this for? What are they trying to finish? What happens when they can’t find it?
Whether it’s a prototype your team built in-house, an application still in development, or a system already in daily use, Knox Design Strategy’s user experience design consultants help firms find out what works for the people using it, and what to change before it goes further.
