This is the project where I got insight into the inner workings of a law firm and realised how much of their business depends on information technology.

Source is a secure search engine for international law firm Allen & Overy. It allows people at the firm to search simultaneously across files, Know How and other data sources from one central point. It is powered by Autonomy and can search around 70 million different documents – really, I didn’t make that up.

My role on the project was to define the user journeys and develop an intuitive user interface that was designed for legal PAs in mind. The design of the UI had to be familiar to users, so the design had to be clean, simple and quite minimal, much the Google approach to UI design.

The biggest challenge was around letting users to refine result quickly. This was achieved with a set of filters on the left hand side for specifying and refining data sources, author, document type, client, matter, topics, countries and languages. By having the filter controls on the left of the same page, it allowed the user to see their results getting narrower within the same page view.

Another trick we adopted to keep the user experience focussed around the results pages was to introduce light-box overlays for settings and saved searches.

Designing the Source brand came about as a side project. They already had chosen the ‘Source’ name and had their art department mocked up a quick logo. I used that as my starting point and then formed it into something tighter, punchy and plush, echoing some of the characteristics of the Allen & Overy brand.

Creating a ‘Getting Started Guide’ was a nice little exercise in introducing users to the UI and keeping the guide so simple it could be read in a few minutes.