Knowable Insights

Team: Engineers, Legal SMEs, PM Focus: Data Viz, Design Systems, User Research

Summary

An analytics system gave Knowable a big pitch over other contract management services: Choose Knowable and we’ll give you insights into how your company tends to negotiate its contracts. Prior to this project Knowable still did store and analyze contracts, but it only let users filter on the results of that analysis, which isn’t as useful. Knowable struggled to stand out and a mass layoff took place on my first day. I was given the ask to construct this new system and I did (supported by a from-scratch design system). This system, Knowable Insights, went live just three months after that layoff. It won both of Legalweek’s product innovation awards and Knowable reported profit for the first time the year it launched.

Old Design

New Design

The User Problem

Corporate legal departments can potentially negotiate hundreds of contracts during a merger, but had no to way learn about how those contracts were negotiated without reading them one at a time. This made it hard for these departments to evaluate their negotiation standards and spot mistakes, among other things.

The Business Need

Knowable already had a system set up by which legal analysts in Chicago and Poland would “code” data about how contracts were negotiated in bulk. (I integrated AI into their tools!) Stakeholders wanted this information to be used to provide an analytics system that would be useful in helping legal departments understand their contracts better.

Organizing a Design Sprint

I used my first week at Knowable to organize a design sprint that would take place on my second. I was the “designer” and invited the project manager to serve as facilitator. I also invited an engineering point of contact, our head of design, and two legal SMEs as regular sprint participants.

Interviews

I invited internal and external SMEs to serve as research participants for the Monday interviews and Friday prototype evaluation. I worked with my PM, who had more domain knowledge than me, to draft interview questions. The intent was to learn what types of coded information participants would be most interested in given their roles.

How do you determine whether contracts at your business are being negotiated correctly?
Can you name three fields we capture that you’re most interested in? If so, which? If not, why not?
If you could see the fields we code represented as charts, would you use them? If so, what would you use the information to do? How often?

Interview Findings

The two roles most likely to use Knowable Insights are chief legal officers and their corporate attorneys.

CLOs would use KI to broadly assess the status of a merger and look for issues. Corporate council would use it to self-evaluate contracts they worked on.

Users are likely to drill into specific contracts whether or not they know in advance what chart they’re interested in.

CLOs are more likely to have a “discovery” period where they search for indicators of risk, whereas their council are more likely to be looking for specific information known in advance. Either way, both user journeys are likely to involve drilling down to individual contracts.

Different user experiences for different personas aren’t necessary.

While general counsel show less interest in an “overview” experience, they do still benefit from it. Customization will be be a useful future feature but for MVP we still code for few enough fields that charts are easy to find with basic preset categories.

The same information architecture will work for both personas for MVP

Simple Sprint Prototype Evaluation

Interview participants returned Friday to test a rough clickable prototype I had constructed Thursday based on sprint findings. Participants were asked to locate a specific contract with only its name and part of how it was negotiated. Feedback was positive and mostly centered around post-MVP feature suggestions.

The rough prototype evaluation: Users selected a bar in a bar chart to view a list of the contracts it represents.

Founding Knowable’s Design System

With the sprint complete, it was time to tighten up the Knowable Insights design. Knowable was a new enough business when I joined that it didn’t have things like colors nailed down yet. To solve this I took inspiration from their logo colors and expanded into a full palette.

I built out Knowable’s component library at the same time to see how the colors I was deciding on would actually show up. I iterated on the colors and components to ensure designs would have WCAG compliant visibility and contrast under the rules of my new system while continuously checking in with engineering, design, and senior leadership to ensure the direction I was taking us met their needs.

Colors and components I created for Knowable’s new design system.

Finding Flexible Chart Designs

I worked with engineering to find a chart library that worked for us and styled those charts to our look and feel. I determined a set of data colors to use that fit the colors I had chosen for the wider design system, then mocked up a sample of what various analytics charts would look like in the Knowable style. I aimed for an informative yet minimalist approach, leaving room for long legal fields without adding unnecessary UI that could clutter the screen further.

The chart designs I created to serve as the backbone for Knowable’s analytics platform.

Final Design for MVP

A v1 mock-up of Knowable Insights.

Results and Reflections

Because I was able to finish KI quickly, a live build launched three months after my start date just in time for LegalWeek. Representatives from Knowable shared KI at a booth and entered it into LegalWeek’s Product Innovation competition where it swept both the people’s and professional’s choices for the award. I don’t have access to data on how KI impacted Knowable’s financials but I can share anecdotally that there were no more mass layoffs, and that Knowable reported to be in the black for the first time later that year. Sales picked up after the feature launched.

Here were my personal learnings from the project:

1. Build relationships with the people who have more domain knowledge than you.

I think was chosen for this role not for my legal tech knowledge, but for my ability to listen and learn. I would never have been able to succeed had I not relied heavily on my more knowledgeable PM as well as other SMEs.

2. Value scope.

The Tuesday sprint ideation session brought to light a lot of really interesting conversations around features like customization ways that data could be integrated with other data. That said, there was a business reality that Knowable was already coding certain data and needed an app that made reasonably good use of that data as quickly as possible. I think the project succeeded because the team stayed focused on what it could do right now.