Wolters Kluwer Legal & Regulatory

Wolters Kluwer contacted me in 2013 and again in 2014 for help in transitioning to a new responsive, user-focused legal publishing site. The original site, IntelliConnect, had a very deep structure, in which users would already have to be familiar with Wolters Kluwer's paper publication titles and organization to have a chance at finding what they were looking for. The navigation was not intuitive and it was difficult to distinguish among search results.

I led the process of auditing the millions of content documents to understand how to group and present them, met with stakeholders to understand how the documents were produced and categorized, and participated in research to understand how users thought about them. We developed new ways to distinguish among the various types of content offered and new ways to guide users to the content they want.

To create the new platform, Cheetah, we organized content into categories that are intuitive to lawyers. For example, securities lawyers often think of federal securities law in terms of the two major laws of 1933 and 1934, so we provided direct navigation to those acts, and to the Securities Act of Delaware, which are applicable to so many American corporations as to require a special callout. The final platform was clean, easy to navigate and provided clear pathways for lawyers based on their areas of focus.

The new Cheetah platform was very positively reviewed. "Cheetah is faster, more flexible to search, cleaner and more responsive in design, and more intuitive to use and navigate," said Robert Ambrogi of the Journal of the American Bar Association.