The quarterly publication of the International Legal Technology Association
Issue link: https://epubs.iltanet.org/i/21494
SMART SOFTWA SMART TRAININ Throw Away the User Manual by Carey Ransom and Brad Cooper T hink about software applications or websites that are truly a pleasure to use. Maybe doing a search on Google.com comes to mind. Now think about applications and sites that are difficult to use. Many times, it is the user-interaction design that makes using these systems either a joy or a frustration. Well-designed systems are intuitive and easy to learn; new users can get some value from the very first use without consulting a massive user’s guide or training manual. Sites like Mint.com, an online consumer application, have made it easy for users to get started, to get immediate value and to grow with the application. Mint provides step-by-step wizards, easy importing of bank and other financial information, progress bars and useful graphs and charts to highlight where users are spending their money and easy ways for users to set and meet financial goals. Think of how much efficiency and cost-savings firms would realize if all their applications were intuitive and easy to use (making beefy training manuals and lengthy courses obsolete); 90 www.iltanet.org Peer to Peer if all their legal software could provide immediate value to users; and if all their law technology solutions were smart enough to customize suggestions and help options based on common tasks and specific profiles of users. Building Better Legal Technology Solutions With some of the newer providers and applications, we are not far off from having more intelligent training built in to legal technology solutions, potentially increasing law practice productivity and client loads. But there are some key things that need to be implemented in our systems to make all of those associated benefits closer to a reality: • Intuitive and simple interface design: Application vendors should spend a lot of time interviewing and watching their intended customers, and then design elegant, simple and familiar user interfaces for those user “personas.”