Law School Transparency

Law School Transparency is a tool for finding law schools based on your job preferences, budget, where you want to work, and more.

I've been hired as a frontend engineer and designer to make improvements to the site wherever I see fit. There is a lot of work to be done, but I'm doing incremental improvements rather than one big redesign.

The main problems I've identified are the following:

• The offerings are not clear. What does LST do? It does many different things, but it needs to focus on solving one problem, and do it very well. The rest should just be secondary/bonus tools.
• There is a lot of technical debt, such as templates inside PHP methods, Bootstrap and a lot of jQuery. We are working on converting this to Laravel, Blade, Tailwind and Vue.
• The styling is inconsistent throughout the site. This can be fixed by:
  • Removing CSS classes and replacing with Tailwind
  • Introducing a style guide
  • Creating components in Blade or Vue

I'll take you through some of what I've accomplished in the last 3 months.

Footer redesign

Before

After

• Added social links
• Added a logo that links to the homepage
• Replaced links that are irrelevant and have been archived
• Changed the colors to a light theme because the home page has too much blue
• Added information about the podcast which is a valuable resource but a bit difficult to find in the site

Home page redesign

Before

After

• Removed call-to-action related to law school advisors, since we are removing this feature
• Rewrote value propositions to make them clearer
• Added illustrations for each testimonial, since we did not have images. This makes it a bit more personal. I also paraphrased these while keeping it accurate, in order to make them shorter.

Legal Career Compass landing page redesign

Before

After

• Make hero copy shorter because no one will read all that
• Created an illustration to show the different offerings as physical books
• Instead of showing the report titles, I talked about the benefits of each, i.e. "Find your law fit" instead of "Law Fit Report"
• Added demos for each toolkit

Shipped a complete redesign of Law School Transparency last week as @LSAC_Official bring it in under the LawHub brand 🔥@trishathecookie has done an amazing job implementing the new brand guidelines 👏https://t.co/PSl4Edt2QE

— Steve Lacey (@stevelacey) January 31, 2023