LegalSite
Privacy regulations like the GDPR require that websites put in place legal documents and procedures to be in compliance. LegalSite offers an all-in-one solution that handles all legal and privacy related procedures. I worked on this project from end-to-end, from concept and research to user flows, sketches, UI design, prototypes, and development.
Scope: Branding, Product and Website
Date: 2019 - 2020
How can we make privacy compliance easy for companies and website owners?
Privacy regulations like the GDPR are built to create a transparent and safe environment for users, but they come with many complex requirements that every website that processes users' data needs to comply with. The information about these requirements is difficult to find and understand, so Startupz saw the need to create a product that could help companies and website owners to handle all legal procedures such as legal pages (Privacy Policy, T&C, etc), cookies pop-ups and many others.
Branding, Product and Website.
Create all designs from scratch and collaborate with developers on the implementation.
Sole designer with a team of 4 developers, one PM and the company owner.
After talking to a few entrepreneurs we noticed the difficulty to find information on how to become privacy compliant, and just by visiting some websites, it’s impressive to see how many of them are not following the requirements or applying incorrect solutions. After some initial research, it became clear that all the products on the market that dealt with privacy regulation issues were only solving part of the requirements, for example, with a cookie pop-up builder. We decided to create an app that offers a complete solution in a user-friendly way. The goal was to create a product that could help companies that process users' personal data make their website privacy compliant. I also developed a website to promote the product, e-mail campaigns, ads, guides, and landing pages for lead magnets.
At Startupz I worked with the company's owner, the project manager, and the developers. During the entire project, I researched a lot to understand all the law’s requirements, risks, and implications. It was difficult to find trustworthy information on the subject, understand the legal articles and share insights with the team in a simple way. The main challenge of the project was turning all the privacy regulations with its complex requirements into an easy-to-use product.
The app was solving a problem that affects many people and needed to be intuitive for website owners, startups, mid-sized companies, and enterprises. It's complex to design for many different audiences so I created 2 main personas to work with.
LegalSite was made to turn privacy regulations into something easy to handle, so I created a brand that communicated trust, and credibility and had a friendly layer. I used the color purple to show a modern and accessible approach to the regulations. The typography used on the titles and headings is a serif font that brings tradition and fits the law-based product. I created a minimal visual identity with a simple logo, with the hexagon representing a shield related to data protection, and the checkmark communicating it's easy to solve tasks on the app.
To structure the information, I wrote all the main legal requirements and divided them into sections:
- Pages: legal document templates for the user to customize and display on his mini-website.
- Privacy Compliance: all compliance requirements such as DPA management.
- Inbox: like an e-mail inbox, where the user can handle all data requests from website visitors.
- Customizations: a place to build cookies pop-ups and customize the mini-site and e-mails.
I used sketches during many steps of the project to save time and iterate quickly when creating new screens, flows, or making changes.
I created diagrams and user flows with many colors and as illustrative as possible to make clear to the team complex journeys and scenarios on the app, such as the data flow on websites.
A product overview, showing the dashboard, inbox, legal page templates, and the customization of the legalsite and the published legalsite.
On the dashboard, the user can have an overview of how compliant is his company and any actions they need to take, such as the latest user requests.
In the Pages section, the user can customize the content of his legal documents from a template. On Settings, they can customize the visuals of their mini legal website, their cookies pop-ups, and the e-mails sent from the app to their users.
The inbox section works like an e-mail, a centralized place to solve all requests with ease and even send outbound requests to data processors.
This is the first version I designed for the inbox. We decided to iterate and make several changes especially after we discussed and realized the complex data flow that involves a multi-level chain of data controllers and data processors.
The problem is that for every request that a data subject sends to a data controller, the data controller needs to pass along all his data processors. This is a huge pain for the user to do manually, so we redesigned the inbox so this can be easily solved automatically.
On the new inbox, the user can receive all the requests from data subjects, and have a better and more focused view of the request (without the extra sidebar from the previous design); we also created a flow in which the user has a guided overview of the tasks he needs to perform to solve the request:
- Internal tasks, where the user can upload data files from the company's systems;
- External tasks, where a table with all the data processors appears automatically, and the user can request them to also send their data files needed. The data processor will receive the request in his own inbox if he has an account, or by email. The data files sent by data processors will appear automatically on the request, and the only thing the user needs to do is press 'Send' to send an email to the data subject with all the data files.
Designing the website was challenging. It needed to be friendly, create trust, and at the same time explain a complex regulation in a simple way. It was important that any user, even without previous knowledge of the laws, could understand the requirements and who needs to comply to these regulations, so they can understand the product and the value offered.
We created an in-dept page for each of the app's main features, so the user can understand clearly the problems, requirements, the value of the solution offered, and how it works on the app, step-by-step.
