Intellectual Property Filing Portal

The Client, company based in UK, had an outdated and unusable platform that needed update and redesign as well as deeper analysis that would make it more useful for end users.

Having a complex workflow which depends on numerous emails and hard to track multichannel communication as well as a lot of attached documents, data and excel sheets, there was a strong need to make their processes omni-chanelled, faster and simpler,  and to build a cloud-based system that would meet their business needs and provide a user friendly and intuitive UX flow for the end users.
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Client Requirements: 

- User-friendly and modern user interface
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- A client-facing web application for filing patent applications and tracking application status
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- An agent-facing web application for managing and provisioning patent applications
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- Their company-facing web application for administration and business processes
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- Filing, prosecution, clients, agents, services, and billing modules

- SSO integration
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- Multiple user roles with multi-tenancy support

Personally, I was involved in communication from the very beginning acting as both the Project Manager / facilitator from my company's side, as well as BA and UX/UI Designer.

By empathising and having long daily video calls with the Client CEO acting as the PO of this project (in order to understand their business process, define requirements, and create an interactive prototype and end-design ready for development) together we analysed, ideated and iterated on sketches and wireframes, until we got the shapes of the 1st part of the whole project - that would be the Step wizard that makes the Patent filing easier. *(shown in screens below)

For 6 months we worked on the UI of a rough amount of 160 scrollable screens with a huge amount of complex tailor made components and design prototype. The whole solution is comprised of 3 main parts:

‍Filing
Focused on making the patent/trademark/design filing process as seamless and user-friendly as possible. Since there were over 30 mandatory fields to fill in, I chose a multi-step wizard approach that grouped related fields in 5 steps therefore decluttered the screen and focused user on each step at a time - providing the faster way of filing and less possibilities for user to make mistakes during the process.

‍Prosecution
This is the very core of the solution, which involves managing the further workflow of submitted quote/order application through various states, reviews, and approvals. Together with Architect I worked on setting up a different state milestone flow which is visible through user interface in order to track the complex multi rolefiling process.

‍Administration
This part consists of modules necessary for managing reference data, such as users, clients, accounts, services, billings, jurisdictions, invoices, and more. The challenge was to create a user-friendly interface that would allow administrators to manage data efficiently. We delivered an intuitive UI that exceeded expectations for managing reference data.