Knowable Insights

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

Summary

Knowable needed a competitive edge in the crowded contract management space. While the platform already stored and analyzed contracts, it only offered basic filtering based on that analysis. I was hired to design Knowable Insights, a data visualization system that would reveal patterns in how companies negotiate contracts, giving sales a compelling differentiator.

The stakes were high: a mass layoff happened on my first day. I designed the system in one month so the team could have working demo ready in time for Legalweek, where it won both product innovation awards. Knowable reported profit for the first time that year.

Old Design

New Design

The User Problem

Corporate legal departments manage hundreds or thousands of contracts, but had no way to understand patterns in how they were negotiated without reading them one at a time. This made it nearly impossible to evaluate their negotiation standards, spot mistakes, or identify which terms they typically concede on versus hold firm.

The Business Need

Knowable already employed legal analysts in Chicago and Poland to ‘code’ contract data, manually tagging how terms were negotiated across clients’ contracts. However, this valuable data wasn’t being surfaced to users in a meaningful way. Stakeholders saw an opportunity: turn this existing asset into an analytics system that would differentiate Knowable in the market.

Project Timeline

With Knowable reeling from layoffs and needing to move quickly, Legalweek became the team’s deadline to have something to share. This gave me one month to design Knowable Insights. With such a short timeline, I decided to run a design sprint (essentially a week-long workshop) during the second week to move the project forward and drive alignment.

Week 1: Prep

I spent my first week at Knowable preparing for the sprint. I…

Recruited sprint and user research participants
Purchased materials (dots, sticky notes, etc)
Compiled a list of fields that Knowable codes for
Created quick personas for Knowable’s users

Field Master Spreadsheet

I compiled an excel for the 33 fields of contract data that Knowable codes. This helped me frame the sprint objective for the participants: How do we turn this document into the most useful analytics dashboard possible?

Personas

I sat down with a legal SME within Knowable to learn about its two main user personas: Chief Legal Officers (CLOs) and those working under them, corporate legal counsel. CLOs use Knowable to assess merger risk and spot problems at scale. Corporate counsel use it to evaluate their own negotiation outcomes and improve their approach.

To prepare for the sprint, I made quick personas that reflected these insights. I then scheduled interviews with both types of users on the first sprint day.

Week 2: The Sprint

My sprint approach followed the 5-day process outlined in Jane Knapp’s Sprint, with Monday altered to focus on heavy user research in order to better inform subsequent designs.

Facilitator, PM, Legal SME: Leonid Prilutskiy

Designer, Organizer: Andrew Newton

Engineering SME: Lucas McDaniel

Senior UX SME: Lana Carlene

The five-day design sprint process we followed. Image credit: thesprintbook.com

Monday: Interviews

I bucketed interview participants into two groups: Those familiar with Knowable’s data model (the spreadsheet above), and those who aren’t. I prepared different question sets for each.

For those who know our data model:

Would it be useful to see some of the fields we code represented as charts? If so, what would you use the information to do? How often?
Can you name three fields we capture that you engage with the most? Is interest in these fields typical for most counsel or unique to your area of focus?
What are questions you wish Knowable would answer about your business’ contract body that it doesn’t already?

For those who don’t:

How do you diagnose contract health at your business today?
If you had a tool that could answer any question about your body of contracts, what questions would you use it to answer, if any?
How often do you find yourself reading through multiple contracts to address a question you have about them? What’s your context when doing that?

Interview Findings

Both personas want to "drill down" from charts into specific contracts, though their paths differ.

CLOs are more likely to have a “discovery” phase where they search for risk indicators, while corporate counsel typically look for specific information they already have in mind. Either way, both journeys end with examining individual contracts.

To help the team understand this process, I decided to build user journey maps Monday evening which document how each persona might use Knowable Insights to drill down from broad contract insights into specific contracts.

Different user experiences for different personas aren’t necessary.

While corporate counsel show less interest in high-level overview pages than CLOs do, they still find value in them. With a limited set of coded fields in the MVP, the interface remains simple enough for both personas to navigate without customization.

The same information architecture works for both personas for MVP.

Tuesday and Wednesday: Ideate and Decide

Sprint participants sketched their ideas and placed dots on the sketches of ideas they liked.

What We Aligned On

With Legalweek not far away, participants wanted to keep things simple: Category tabs showing charts for the fields we code with the ability to click on a part of a chart to drill down into the contracts populating it.

Ideas Deemed out of Scope for MVP

An AI risk analysis targeted towards CLOs
Expanding a single chart to see detail and add filters
Dashboard customization

Thursday: Designing a Prototype

With the team’s support, I designed a mock dashboard containing data that research participants felt best fit an “Overview” landing page.

First mock-up of Knowable Insights showing charts of captured data based on sprint findings.

Friday: Prototype Evaluation

Interview participants returned on Friday to test a clickable prototype. I asked them to locate a specific contract using just its name and one negotiated term. They would need to do this by selecting part of a chart to drill down into the underlying list of contracts. This aimed to test:

Overall look and feel
Whether the selection of charts/categories landed
Reaction to the ability to click on chart data to drill down to specific contracts

Results

Users loved the drill-down feature and overall approach. Constructive feedback included:

Colors looked washed out
Category tabs were difficult to find
KPIs were obtrusive

Weeks 3/4

After the sprint, I focused on refining the Thursday prototype. There were two big efforts:

Tightening up the visual design
Building the charts

Moving the visual design forward was a challenge due to Knowable having no established design system yet, so I made one.

Founding Knowable’s Design System

I founded the Knowable Design System to support Knowable Insights. I constructed a color palette inspired by the Knowable logo, built a type ramp, and documented a full component library, iterating to ensure WCAG-compliant contrast and visibility. I checked in regularly with engineering, design, and leadership to ensure the system would scale beyond this initial project. I have a full portfolio article for this here.

Columns — Responsive layout documentation

Tooltip specs — Hovercard/tooltip documentation

Finding Flexible Chart Designs

I updated my spreadsheet of Knowable’s captured legal fields to include “chart type” and filled it in based on how I recommended portraying the data. This gave me an idea of how many different kinds of charts I’d be asking engineering to build for MVP.

I also sat down with legal SMEs to determine what navigation tab each chart should live on along with its hierarchical importance on that page.

To turn this spreadsheet into real charts, I collaborated with engineering to evaluate and select a chart library that could handle complex legal data while remaining customizable. Once selected, I styled the charts to match Knowable’s design system, developing a data visualization color palette that maintained accessibility standards while distinguishing between multiple data series.

I designed various chart types in the Knowable style, prioritizing a minimalist approach that could accommodate lengthy legal field names without cluttering the interface.

Final Treatment for MVP

Results and Reflections

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Knowable Insights launched at Legalweek. Representatives demonstrated it at a conference booth and entered it into the Product Innovation Awards, where it won both the attendees’ choice and judges’ choice awards. While I don’t have detailed financial data, the impact was clear: no further layoffs occurred, sales increased after launch, and Knowable reported profitability for the first time later that year.

Key Takeaways:

1. Build relationships with people who have domain expertise you lack. I believe I was chosen for this role not for legal tech knowledge, but for my ability to listen and learn. Success depended on leaning on building trust with subject matter experts who could fill my knowledge gaps.

2. Respect scope constraints. The sprint ideation surfaced exciting possibilities: customization features, data integrations, and advanced analytics. But the business reality was clear, Knowable was already coding specific data and needed a solution that leveraged it quickly. The project succeeded because we stayed focused on what we could deliver now, not what might be possible later.