ABC Legal Research-led UI Redesign
Role
Lead Designer – User Research, UX, and Visual Design
Client
ABC Legal (Limina)
Year
2021
ABC Legal, a national process-serving company, asked Limina for a quick visual refresh of their mobile app — something more modern, more branded, more "Uber for process servers."
I joined as the lead on the visual design kickstart and a core contributor on the research team, and helped make the case for a deeper foundation. Over 13 hours of user interviews with folks across the country, translated into personas, a behavior model, and a journey map that shaped every design decision that followed.
The result was a new visual direction — built on real behavioral insight rather than aesthetic preferences alone that ABC Legal adopted and shipped to production.
Impact
Reframed a "just make it look nicer" request into a research-backed design foundation, expanding a short engagement into a multi-phase project the client initially resisted.
Delivered a user-validated design direction that went live in ABC Legal's shipped app.
Built reusable Figma deliverable templates (personas, behavior model, journey map) — now part of Limina's broader toolkit.
ABC Legal's app before the redesign.
ABC Legal’s new design direction.
Understanding the Users
ABC Legal had customer feedback, but no real behavioral picture of their users, and nowhere to keep what they learned. To start, we identified interview candidates across the U.S. spanning age and tenure with the company, and conducted 13 one-hour phone interviews. I helped conduct interviews, take notes, and log tagged findings in an Airtable repository as we went — which made segmentation and synthesis much faster down the line.
We delivered the repository along with a final presentation of process, findings, and recommendations that went beyond the app itself, surfacing insights relevant to ABC Legal's broader business.
User Segmentation
From the research, our team built:
Personas (3 major, 1 minor) to segment users
A behavior model mapping where user behaviors converged and diverged
A journey map tracing how users move through the serving process
These findings directly shaped the design phase — for example, the journey map surfaced how much of the work happens in the field, on the move, and/or under a time crunch, which became a key input into the interface decisions that followed.
This was also the first project where Figma deliverable templates I'd designed for reuse across Limina projects were put to the test. Our freelance designer picked them up and produced polished output with minimal guidance — a good sign they'd hold up beyond this one engagement.
Four personas built from my Figma deliverable template.
Behavior model built from my Figma deliverable template.
Persona journey map, built from a template I helped develop.
Setting Design Direction with Style Tiles
With research underway, I moved into style tile exploration — guiding our freelance designer through the process, since it was new to her, and helping her identify which UI elements would best communicate each direction.
ABC Legal wanted "modern and sexier," and the team agreed the current app had no real brand presence. I created one style tile direction; our freelancer created a second. Both leaned into a more branded look, but with distinct personalities.
We ran three rounds of stakeholder review with initial reaction, revisions, and final direction. Midway through, the client asked for a light and dark mode exploration; they ultimately chose to move forward with dark mode only, for now. As typically happened on client engagements, the final direction was a hybrid: elements from both tiles, refined into one point of view.
My round two style tiles, light and dark mode.
My final style tile — a hybrid with a round one direction from our freelance designer.
Concept Mockup and Prototyping
Once the direction was locked, I applied it to a key workflow — which, as these things go, quickly became several. I built out a clickable Figma prototype so ABC Legal could see the direction applied across multiple components and states, not just one static screen.
Final concept mockups, delivered as a clickable Figma prototype.
The Results
ABC Legal is a small, fast-moving, and eager to ship team. That occasionally made it hard to hold the line on a fixed number of revision rounds and scope crept more than once. But in the end, we kept the engagement on time and on budget while still meeting their expectations.
Research was a hard sell going in. By the final presentation, ABC Legal was genuinely won over — not just by the design direction, but by how much the research revealed about their business beyond the interface.