Kent County E-File
November 2024 - February 2025
This was a project I completed for Kent County while working for Webtecs, Inc. I performed the role of Lead UX Designer. The goal was to create an online filing system that provides parties the ability to electronically file documents in the 17th Circuit Court and Probate Courts, 24 hours a day, without traveling to a courthouse and waiting in line to do it in person.
Methods Practiced
Skills Used
New Methods Used
For this project I decided to use a some new methods I had been studying and practicing in mock briefs. These methods were the Jobs to be Done Theory, Object Oriented UX, and ORCA (which stands for objects, relationships, calls to action, and attributes.) These methods would completely alter the way I practice UX design, proving to be super valuable tools to understanding users and stakeholder needs..
Discover Phase
In this initial phase I completed some tried and true practices like Stakeholder Interviews and a Competitive Analysis.
Stakeholder Interviews
I met with eight different Stakeholders to gather their thoughts and put together a list of requirements for the new Kent County E-File application. We came up with the below initial list of requirements.
Feature Requirements
No need for the User to login
Case Search/Confirm
Separate Applications for 17th and Probate Courts
Field to enter case types
Create a new Case
Party Type Selection
Document Type Selection
Document Upload
Field Validation
Captcha Check
Checkout Review Page
Pay using PayIt
Return to a Confirmation/Review/Receipt Page
Confirmation Email Sent
Collection of Filer/User Information
Competitive Analysis
I began with a Competitive Analysis. I find this to be the perfect place to start as it allows me to Identify opportunities, establish industry benchmarks, understand trends in an industry I am not familiar with.
I conduct a SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunity, and threats) Analysis on three different competitors as a part of this process.
Example of one of the SWOT Analysis completed on a unnamed competitor.
Define Phase
During the Define Phase I used some of the practices I have become quite familiar with using such as creating User Personas and a User Journey. However, this is when I inserted one of my new Methods, the JTBD Theory. I based everything in this phase of off these jobs to be done I had created. It did wonders for this phase, improving my connection to the user in new and better ways than before!
Jobs to be Done Statements
Public User
As an Attorney I want to decrease the time it takes to file a document with the P/C Court.
As a Legal Assistant I want to increase where and when I can file a document with the P/C Court.
As a Party in the case I want to decrease the complexity of any legal dealings with P/C Court.
Admin User
As an Employee I want to decrease the time it takes to review a document filed online with the KC eFile app.
As an Employee I want to increase where and when I can review a document filed online with KC eFile app.
As an Employee I want to increase the ease of approving or denying a Fee Wavier submitted with an online document filing.
User Personas
Using the Jobs to be Done statements I created a few User Personas. These JTBD statements were an excellent resource to have with me as I created these personas. I feel that they kept the needs of the persona’s front and center.
User Flows
Drawing upon the research and insights gained from the JTBD statements and the User Personas I crafted some initial user flows. I then conducted a few meeting with the Stakeholders at the county to review and improve the flows. I made flows for the Public User and the Admin User which you can see here.
Admin User flow for Kent County E-file.
OOUX & ORCA
After the Discover and Define phases I moved onto a new phase in my design process; the OOUX phase. OOUX is a user experience design method that sets the goal of identifying the main objects that potential users will be interacting with. ORCA is a method based on OOUX that was created by Sophia Prater. It lays out a roadmap to finding these objects, understanding their relationships to each other, determining the actions users wish to take on them, and finally establishing the attributes the objects have.
Noun Foraging
Noun foraging is the generally a great first step in the ORCA method. OOUX is a method that believes people think in objects first. ORCA working off of this assumption generally begins with Noun Foraging or searching for the most common nouns in the project materials as these nouns are usually the objects people will be using to mental move around and through the application.
I gathered all the materials from my UX research, the user personas, the site maps, the user flows, and all notes from meetings and interviews. I then sat down and wrote down the most common nouns that appeared (and their synonyms). This lead me to the list of nouns or objects below.
Noun Foraging Objects
Court
Case
Party
Coordinator
Order Number
Document
Attorney
Fee Wavier
This list of objects would now serve as guide for my design. These are the most important things the users need to complete their Jobs outlined above.
Relationship Mapping
After discovering my objects, it was time to explore the relationships between them. I used a practice called relationship mapping to do this. I analyzed how each object relates to another object by asking questions like “Does a Case have have one or many Parties associated with it?” and “Does a Document belong to one Case or more than one Case?”
I like to visualize these questions on a relationship map, although it looks very complex it really helps me breakdown these relationships so that I can ask stakeholders important questions that I am unsure of the answers to.
CTA Discovery
Now that I was able to get a better understanding of the objects and how they relate to each other, it was time to determine what user would need to do to these objects. As mentioned OOUX believes people think in objects which are generally the nouns in a project, Calls to Action on the other hand are the verbs in the project. CTA Discovery is about finding out what people need/want to do to or with the objects important to them.
Below is the CTA Discovery I completed for the most important objects.
Case
Create/Edit/Delete a Case
File a Case
Upload Document to a Case
Search for a Case
Assign a Case Type
Assign/Add a Party
Add and Attorney
Apply Fee Waiver.
Document
Select Document Type
Name Document
Upload to a Case
Remove from a Case
See Document Fee
Party
Create/Edit/Delete Party
Search for Party
Assign to a Case
Remove from a Case
Add Attorney
Court
Select a Court
Remove a Court
Attorney
Search for Attorney
Create/Edit/Delete Attorney
Assign to a Case
Add to a Party
Remove from a Partys
Order
Edit/Delete Order
Download Order
Make Payment on Order
Share Order
FAQ's
Create/Edit/Delete Fee Waiver
Add to a Party
Add to a Case
Remove from a Party
Remove from a Case
Review Denied Fee Waiver
Request review of Denied Fee Waiver
Attribute Listing
The last phase in the ORCA process involves the attributes of an object. The attributes of object are what identify the object to the user. It’s name or title, the data and metadata it is made up of like dates and descriptions. Attribute listing is simply listing out the attributes that belong to each object. Some attributes that belong to an object may actually be other objects. ORCA calls these Nested Objects. An example below is that a Case has the attribute of a Party, which is itself an object on its own.
Develop
After completing a couple rounds of ORCA and meeting with the team to discuss, it was time to begin developing wireframes, prototypes, and conducting testing on them.
Sketches
I nearly always begin with paper and pencil sketches when building wireframes out. Below are some of the early sketches I made for this application.
Wireframes
Here are the initial wireframes that I put together. We had a number of meetings discussing things in this stage of fidelity before moving on to crafting more detailed designs.
Landing Page
Existing Case Search Page
Add a Fee Waiver Page
Usability Testing
After wireframing some initial designs and reviewing them with stakeholders, we decided it was the right time to run usability tests. I conducted five sessions, each offering really valuable insights.
To make the most of the feedback, I organized the results into a Rainbow Sheet (see below), and also scored each finding on a 1–5 scale using the Nielsen Norman method. These two steps are essential in my process as they help me get the most value out of usability testing, which I see as one of the highest-impact things you can do in a UX project.
Rainbow Sheet based on usability test results.
Deliver
After completing usability testing I began putting together the final designs for the hand off to our Front End developer. We worked in Figma for this, using the comment tool to share information and having regular meetings together to make sure we got the designs right.
Final Designs
The final designs followed Kent County’s already established design system for the UI. I did decide to move on from the typical filter search set up for the Admin side, you can see the update difference below.
Image 1
Image 2
Image 3
The standard design for the admin search and filter functions included everything that you could filter by showing with the search bar seen in Image 1 above.
This method however had an issue, it became very crowded with the options required to filter by for the E-file application. To solve this I designed a filter button (as shown in Image 2) that lead to a pop-up for the admin user to select the filter options they wish to search by (Image 3).
Figma File
You can view the Figma file I shared with our developer here:
Kent County E-File - Application Design
Reflection
I was very excited for the opportunity to design an App for the first time. I was brought on slightly late to the process due some team assets being moved around and I was given a big role to start. In some ways I was proud of how I stepped up and in other ways I learned valuable lessons that could only really come from experience.
Hosting Stakeholder Meetings
After being added to this project I soon began hosting meetings with the Stakeholder team. And I was very nervous and not totally prepared for it, but through weekly meetings I started to get comfortable and develop strategies for handling these meetings. One big step I found helpful in making progress was teaching the stakeholders how to use the Figma basics. This allowed us to make progress outside of the meetings and then use the meetings to discuss the changes requested and made in more depth and detail. I was very fortunate to work with a team that was passionate and cared greatly for the work we were doing.
New Methods
The journey to being a great designer involves continuous learning. I have been exploring new methods for my design other than what I learned in my previous education. These methods included the Jobs to be Done Theory, Object Oriented UX, and ORCA. Trying these out for the first time I made mistakes and had to make many corrections and back tracking, but they ultimately lead to a far better, more focused outcome than previous methods I had tried. Feel free to check out my breakdown and how I use these methods in my design methods section.
Developer Hand off
This was the first time I worked with a front end developer and a back end developer. The project definitely suffered from what both teams referred to as “scope creep” discovering that the initial needs of the project were much greater as it was explored further. This did put my preparedness for the developer hand off in a poor state. A very valuable lesson I learned was to set up my documents with the developers in mind from the start and to communicate with the developers on their preferences for the handoff. This way when setbacks like scope creep or anything else occurs I can still have the document ready for hand off when the stage comes.