Early-stage companies often keep messy legal records, which can be expensive to straighten out later. At Gust, I helped to design a tool for entrepreneurs to get legally organized from the beginning.
This project was still in the exploration phase when I joined it. We held brainstorms and discussions about the problem, and the idea of ‘workflows’ started to emerge as a core concept — an entrepreneur could choose an office task or workflow type, enter a minimal amount of information, and the tool would generate the appropriate legal documents. But which tasks would be available, what information would be required, and what documents would be produced was still undetermined.
Workflow sketches
When I moved from sketches to wireframes, it became obvious that we’d been using the same words to describe different things. We had to spend some time examining our assumptions and refining a model for how the product worked. Because we were still thinking at a high level, I tried to keep the wireframes at a lower fidelity.
First steps in designing the workflow wizard
After making some progress, I started designing at actual size with existing styles from the main Gust site. During this period I looked more closely at the lists of documents we were trying to produce, and we tested using the design to record a legal relationship, both of which revealed a few gaps in our thinking.
More refined wireframes
The first design approach started to break down when we tried to add more complicated document types. I explored ideas for making the task wizard full-page, and we chose this one as being the most extensible.
With each iteration, the workflow wizard became more robust, but there were still a lot of business strategy decisions to be made. This project eventually merged with an acquired company’s product and evolved into Gust Launch.
Full-page wizard