Incorporation & Business Filings Designs

Ideation, Low/Medium-Fidelity Wireframing, Prototyping, Usability Testing

Overview

From the Incorporation & Business Filings Research, we know that our primary target audience at Rocket Lawyer is a first-time business owner. This project is aimed to increase customer value by delivering more useful features and experiences to our business owners who have incorporated inside and outside of Rocket Lawyer.

This is an ongoing project and the ideas/designs so far are illustrated in medium fidelity wireframes.

Mid-fidelity Wireframes for Post-Incorporation Filings Manager Designs

Challenge

The current Rocket Lawyer dashboard has the capability of only creating, storing, and editing documents/questions. Many people within the organization have been stuck to the idea of this product centering around only documents, rather than visioning how this product could be useful by re-orienting ourselves from an end users’ perspective.

My Role

I’m the sole product designer in this project, and I work very closely with my product manager (PM) and other stakeholders (i.e. front-end engineers, back-end engineers, and operations) to figure out the best approach to visualize and pitch these new ideas to the executive team.

Solution

My team and I have designed a brand new space for business customers to setup their company, to manage their business/legal documents, as well as to submit any recurring government-related filings with reminders and notifications. Although this is an ongoing project, a lot of thoughts and iterations have been put into this project already.

Background/Problem

Our primary target audience is first-time business owners who are typically overwhelmed, have limited amount of funding, couldn’t afford lawyers, and want more guidance in terms of both business and legal needs that they are not familiar with. So, how would we help them overcome these hurdles of starting a new business? We need to first setup some UX goals and metrics to make sure we are cheering for our customers.

UX Goals & Measurable Metrics

At the beginning of this project, we set UX Goals and measurable metrics to hold ourselves accountable as we are designing and building new features:

1. Communicate to our users how our membership is beneficial to the life of their business.
   [Metrics] Extend the average membership length of business owners from 3 months to 1 year.
2. Give our users additional options that can help jumpstart their business.
   [Metrics] Increase add-on purchases through filings by 15%.
3. Provide our users everything needed to keep their business in compliance.
   [Metrics] Support first personalized in-app compliance experience.

User Journey

I’ve created a user journey to grasp how current business owners are using our website to incorporate their businesses.

User Journey and Emoticon Legend

Current Incorporation User Journey at Rocket Lawyer

As you can see, there are some unpleasant feelings throughout the current incorporation user journey: 1) during the interview questions, and 2) the dashboard experience post-incorporation.

From the Incorporation & Business Filings Research, we have validated that customers are having a more negative experience immediately after paying for their incorporation. The main reason is because the experience and guidance stops right after they’ve submitted their incorporation for filing.

Also, I’ve conducted further research in what business owners actually must do to be a legitimate business after incorporation:

A high-level user Journey for a regular business owners from incorporation to recurring compliance tasks (Link)

Based on different entities (LLC, S-Corp, C-Corp, and Non-Profit) formed, business owners have specific requirements they need to keep up with after they’ve incorporated their businesses. Some examples are:

• Different IRS forms for tax-related requirements
• Create bylaws, issue shares and hold shareholder meetings
• Separation of business and personal assets
• Recurring compliance requirements (i.e. annual reports, franchise tax, state fees, etc.)

Vision Map

So, now that we know what they need and want, how would we help them? Where do we want to go and what do we want to design and build? After numerous discussions and iterations of how we would like to build our Filings vision, below is the Vision Map to illustrate how everything is connected together.

Overview of end-to-end vision map for filings customer journey (Link)

Because the vision map above is quite complicated, below is a simpler overview of what we would like to see in the Filings designs — Part A: Filings Interview and Part B: Post-Interview:

Vision map overview of the filings interview and post-interview experience

Part 1: Filings Interview

There are five main sections of the Filings Interview:

1. Jurisdiction: This is a section for user to choose which state and entity they would like to incorporate.
2. People/Companies: We would ask questions about the responsible parties and information about the company they’d like to incorporate.
3. Relevant Add-ons: These add-ons are services we’d like to offer our users to help them with their businesses after they incorporate. This includes having a Registered Agent (RA), getting a Tax ID (EIN), etc.
4. Review: Before users are ready to pay and submit their incorporation for filing, this section is for them to confirm and review all the information they’ve given us.
5. Final Activation: This last section is for users to sign up their membership and pay to submit their incorporation filing.

From a UX perspective, we’d like to help and guide our users as much as possible with systems we would be setting up as they are filling out information for their incorporation. From a business perspective, we’d like to intake as much user input as possible so we’d understand what they need for future recommendations.

Part 2: Post-Interview

Since this is an end-to end customer experience, we don’t just want to help them incorporate with the government, we want to give them a full package. This new post-interview experience is intended to provide more value to our customers after they’ve incorporated their business. For post-interview activities, there are three main sections:

1. Walkthrough: This is a new section that provides all the initial setup tasks a new business owner should complete right after incorporation. Some examples are LLC Operating Agreement, opening a business bank account, creating bylaws, etc.
2. Company Operations: Because Rocket Lawyer is a legal documentation service, a lot of the business operations relies on legally-binding contracts, agreements, manuals, etc. Business owners can use this already existing feature within the Rocket Lawyer dashboard currently.
3. Government-related Filings: This section is also new, and the main intent is to help customers be aware of their compliance requirements of having a business by providing notifications and reminders periodically based on their official incorporation dates.

Wireframing in Sketch

Below are ideas on some of the wireframe designs for both Part A: Filings Interview and Part B: Post-Interview. I started off with these are low to medium-fidelity wireframes to convey ideas and flow to our stakeholders before diving into the visual designs and copy.

Part A: Filings Interview Wireframe Designs

Part B: Post-Interview Wireframe Designs

Prototyping & Usability Testing using InVision

For business reasons, the team decided that Part B: Post-Interview was a priority over Part A: Filings Interview, so I’ve linked the wireframes together to create a prototype using InVision, and conducted usability testing through User Testing for the Part B: Post-Interview interactions.

InVision Prototype for Part B: Post-Interview Activities (Link)

The main question for our business owners participants is:

As a current or previous business owner, what would you wish these designs would have to help you more?

Affinity Diagram for synthesizing all the usability testing data for Part B: Post Interview Prototype Designs

3 Major themes identified from this usability testing:

• Participants would want some type of onboarding process explaining each feature when the Filings Manager is first introduced to the users.
• They really would like other business resource recommendations such as tax preparation, what to look for, what to file, and finance information.
• They’d also prefer an expert to talk to if they need help, perhaps a live chat option or on the phone.

Key Takeaway

As a team, we’ve learned that the participants who are either current or previous business owners really enjoyed the new post-interview experience and features we would like to introduce. One of the quotes directly from a participant:

There’s really nothing like this out there to help us track our business/legal activities.

It provides clarity and guidance on what to do and how to do it as a new business owner. Participants greatly appreciated the visibility and thoughtfulness of the experience without always needing to call customer service.

Next Steps

Iterate on the Part B: Post-interview designs based on usability testing feedback, and continue to test new designs. Once Part B: Post-interview designs are launched, then we would go back and start the Part A: Filings Interview designs.

Note that Part A and Part B are independent user flows.

Next project: Internal Tool Designs using Salesforce CRM