Patenting Workflows for Lawyers & Inventors

After redesigning some of the lawyer experience, the client asked me to look at the finance application and suggest improvements. In discovery, I found that finance spends significant time filtering, searching, and running reports to identify trends in data, as well as entering data.

I suggested a redesign of the finance application to improve proactive predictive analytics, including graphs and modernizing the interface with the clients branding.

By proposing the table component I designed for the lawyer application, I was able to make a huge improvement to the data table with minimal pushback from engineers.

Designing graphs made predictions faster, and small changes like alternating row colors made the dense data easier to scan. I also designed a single button that switches the entire view into an editable state. This got pushback since Salesforce's standard is inline editing, where you hover to reveal a pencil icon per field. My concern was that those icons would constantly interrupt users who were just trying to read the data. Once I framed it as two distinct journeys, viewing versus editing, the team came around and we pushed for the custom pattern.

Lawyers struggle with visibility between in-house council and outside council, delaying patent approval. They aren't notified when changes are made, making the application more of a database than an interactive experience.

I redesigned patent detail page, patent search experience, data entry workflows, and a homepage that reduced decision fatigue on next best actions.

Since the best UX required changing much of what the engineers had previously built, I kept the animated four color header bar in the redesign as a nod to their creativity. Showing respect for their previous ideas kept the team aligned on creating the best experience for our users, even with many of the changes I suggested.

The current design utalized many random colors, fonts, and font styles with no previous design governance. I developed the design system I created for another employee application, now with a clear font heirarchy and color pallet in additon to components, to guide future decisions. I developed this design system to work across employee tools, bringing the company branding into complex systems while keeping workflows simple.

Inventors are dropping off from poor submission UX, yet the business drives to support an increase in AI patents.

Designed the Awards portal from scratch to increase patents by gamifying patenting for Inventors.

After presenting the initial design to the head of technology, I learned that patents and defensive publications we distinctly different and I needed to display different meta-data. This informed a toggle between different cards in my second iteration, as well as creating different card styles in the lawyer application. When working in complex domains and learning on the fly, these type of industry nuances are a primary driver of feedback.

I designed an interactive experience based on the physical puzzle piece awards that inventors receive at certain milestones to incentivize patent submissions to incentivize patent submission.