WilmerHaleis committed to ensuring that WilmerHale.com offers a frictionless way to drive consideration, support the brand, and build client relationships. Since the launch of the site in May 2018, there have been areas of the site identified by the business that are in need of an improved experience. Testing with end users will help validate areas that are in need of improvement and may uncover new opportunities for an enhanced experience

We conducted one-hour one-on-one interviews with 19 participants who were internal WilmerHale users or external Business Development Managers.

We encourage the users to think out loud so better understand their expectations and collect better feedback.

We then had them navigate to the external facing WilmerHale website to complete a series of tasks representative of typical areas someone may visit.

The current design of the WilmerHale site is precise, consistent, and balanced. The branding, modules, and page layouts work well together to create an experience for users to gather information needed in a logical presentation.

The well-balanced pages gave users confidence in their ability to comprehend dense blocks of content. Internal users commented on the current design being “modern” and “fresh” compared to their competitors

The majority of the content displayed on the site provided users with confidence in connection or retaining WilmerHale for their individual matters.

The look and feel of the site paired with carefully chosen imagery left users with a positive reaction to the site.

Many users commented on imagery that tied back to the subject at hand, helping users to quickly understand chunks of content that could feel cumbersome without support imagery.

In this case, powerful imagery is helping to sell the brand and experience. The imagery complemented the content well in that users saw the modern look merged with supporting content as professional and corporate

Almost all users felt confident in retaining WilmerHale’s services and in doing so easily. Users commented on how it was helpful to have the direct lawyers’ contact information to be able to reach out immediately and felt that the information was easy to find.

The content presented on the site enforced a positive stance on users indicating the confidence they felt in reaching out

Users were thrown off by the transitional nature of the imagery on the homepage. It overwhelmed users and didn’t provide any further content or actionable information. A few users commented that it was distracting from searching or navigating deeper into the site.

Consider having a powerful static background image or various images that are not transitioning to alleviate the distraction on the page and allow the user to focus on navigating into the experience.

The word “verbose” was used multiple times when asked about overall thoughts of the experience, specifically on various detail pages. The users easily got lost in the amount of information, scrolling, and page hierarchy, which exposed them to absorbing clutter rather than useful information.

Additionally, the solutions section of the people pages became an obstacle to reviewing the content they were there to consume as one click navigated them away from the biography they were reading.

The amount of information displayed on People detail should be evaluated to determine the content that best serves the user, eliminates clutter, and unnecessary information.

Potentially redesigning or reorganizing modules based on the content provided to better match users expectations.

Insisting the user load 18 more results each time is time-consuming and unnecessary. Additionally, there seemed to be no prioritization in the content displayed, and that threw users off a bit.

A new approach to the load more functionality could be a lazy load rather than random results loading each time. There should also be a prioritization of content that is more in line with practice leaders and partners rather than alphabetically.

Through user testing and the tracking in place, we have learned that users are specifically interacting with only a few of the filters and tabs on Insights & News landing.

Consider reprioritizing or standardizing which filters are available for the users and where they are placed.

A consistent comment that we received from internal users was how the solutions listing page lacked all of the areas WilmerHale focused in and that there didn’t seem to be a reasoning behind it.

Some items that were apart of a larger category were shown but some were not which seemed inconsistent and confusing to users overall. Additionally, there was some noted confusion around the terms ”solutions” versus “practice areas” being more straight forward and “less wordy”.

Potentially consider redesigning the layout of this page to be consistent with People and Insight & News landing to have overall layout consistency across pages allowing for more or all practice areas to be added to the landing page and not be in an overwhelming link listing format.

We would recommend populating the page with all results allowing the user to browse or filter down the results as they please.