Essay Writing for
Legal Learners
Product | UX | Accessibility | Design Systems
The Product
Barbri Bar Review is a premier educational resource & LMS for legal learners & law school graduates preparing to pass their Bar Exam and begin their careers as fully licensed attorneys.
The Problem
Due to an outdated essay submission process that regularly induces user-error, students often delay completing essay assignments until the very end of their Bar Prep course - constraining the available time students could have to increase their essay-writing proficiency.
The Project
(1) Deliver students an engaging, in-app essay-writing experience that modernizes the writing & submission process with accessible tools and features.
(2) Launch a post-essay, self-grading exercise to deepen essay-takers’ understanding of the grading and scoring process for Bar exam essays, enhancing their exam prep.
(3) Introduce Mobile Score Reports & Performance Feedback for Essays - enabling student access to essay review on any mobile device, anytime/anywhere.
Tools | Figma, Adobe Suite, Miro, JIRA
Duration | Feb 2024 - May 2024
Team | Society Product Squad (1 Product Owner, 1 PM, 1 UX, 7-8 Devs)
My Role | Lead Product Designer
Background
Planning & Requirements Gathering
Research + Competitive Analysis
Findings + SWOT Analysis
Content Alignment (Challenge)
User Flows + Mapping
Wireframes
Applying the Design System
Prototyping
User Testing
Feature Showcase
Notable Impacts & Outcomes
Project Takeaways
The Process |
Background
Founded in the 1960s, BARBRI has long been a market leader for law students looking to prep for the Bar Examination. Originally providing in-book/lecture-based prep courses, the company has since pivoted to providing tech-enabled, educational learning experiences to aid legal learners worldwide.
As part of BARBRI's strategic roadmap to modernize an outdated essay submission workflow, this new user experience modernizes the submission process and enables bar exam students to seamlessly word process and submit essays for grading and review.
It was my responsibility to lead the end-to-end product design from concept to launch. My goal was to create an accessible experience that prepares students to write passing essays by emulating the testing environment & support the orgs strategic target metrics and goals.
Planning + Requirements Gathering
Meeting often and early with stakeholders for high-level planning and MIRO white-boarding sessions was essential for organizing our design, testing, and development efforts. Facilitating these sessions with stakeholders, I gathered the business' goals, known KPIs, existing data, and expected student/business outcomes from implementing this new experience.
We had a menagerie of goals to achieve and limited time and resources. To manage our undertaking, we broke each piece of the system into user groups and identified their personas, pain points, features, and conceived the technical requirements.
Competitive Analysis + Research
To help direct our UX approach, I conducted research on widely used word-processing programs and the essay-exam interface with the purpose of:
(1) Identifying user expectations and habits with word-processing tools,
(2) Discovering marketable features that could help elevate our experience.
Additionally, I investigated the latest product releases from our closest competitors to see what essay prep services they offered and what/how we could learn from their product launches.
In parallel to research, I collaborated with BARBRI’s leading subject-matter experts — the BARBRI professionals responsible for crafting the learning materials and grading student essays. Their input gave us insight into student writing and submission metrics, the types of feedback students reported being most meaningful, and the types of complaints they often encountered when mentoring students.
Findings + SWOT Analysis
Here are some key insights from our initial research:
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Market Opportunity: Competitors offer essay evaluation, but none provide a fully digital experience—positioning BARBRI to lead in digital essay assessment and feedback.
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User Preferences: Gen Z users prefer online learning environments and value access to diverse performance metrics and resources to improve essay skills.
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Resource Efficiency: Limited dev resources prompted us to build upon Adaptibar’s Writing Guide (a recently acquired sister product) - enhancing it with accessible design and customizing with new features and interface.
Content Alignment (Challenge)
During our cross-team collaboration with the learning content team, we discovered an issue between the architecture our team was in the process of building and the content files we would be migrating into our application, as not all of our content was fully digitized. If we weren’t able to align this data (the essay prompts, case libraries, and grading rubrics), our experience would render inaccurately and be completely unusable.
With extensive collaboration between the tech and learning content teams— we worked to ensure alignment between digital content files and the UX presented in our essay experience. Additionally, this alignment between content and data harmonized both UX and book layout hierarchies. Enabling students to seamlessly use their books alongside digital essay case files and rubrics, we provided students an additional means to prep with their study books. This approach ensured both an enhanced user experience and accurate, verifiable data migration.
User Flows + Mapping the UX
While the content team worked on digitizing and restructuring the remaining content files, I jumped into MIRO to map out user flows. I used this space to collaborate with product owners, stakeholders and engineers, as it gave our team the ability for everyone to be hands-on and provide feedback. Furthermore, mapping out the the experience with my PO fostered shared understanding of the end-goal experience and how it would fit into the larger business goal of creating a comprehensive essay management system.
Wireframes
With user flows and mapping approved by stakeholders, I could begin creating our new experience utilizing wireframes- providing the team with an shared vision of the application's base-interface and the common UX elements/patterns we would be patterning from other BARBRI products to create cohesion with the existing LMS. This also gave me the platform needed to begin parsing technical details with the engineering team and how we would could successfully deliver our product on-time.
Applying the Design System
Once wireframes were complete and approved - I proceeded to produce the both mid & high-fidelity screens and mocks using Figma. As a foundational member on the UX team, I curated the first accessible component library that is currently implemented across all BARBRI learning products (WCAG 2.0+ compliant). Below is a sampling of that design system.
Prototyping
After a few rounds of iterations and gathering feedback, I would be able to use the high-fidelity screens to produce a fully-usable prototype to use for both quality assurance with the engineering, as well as with users in upcoming user testing initiatives.
This prototype was created using Figma.
User Testing
To validate our experience, I led and facilitated a user research initiative with proctored, testing sessions to observe how users interacted with our application. Using the prototyped experience, student-users were asked to complete tasks as they would if they were using our platform to complete an essay, add/edit a note, and find articles quickly within their case library using a new Table of Contents feature. Additionally, we inquired about their expected outcome depending on which grading path they selected to complete review (self-grading vs submit to a grader).
All participants reported that they would have preferred their essay prep as an in-app experience had it been available- most likely, completing daily essays as they were served within their course- not postponing them until the end of their course.
From these testing efforts, we were about to report that 88% of users were able to successfully complete all usability tasks without needing any additional assistance or prompting.
Features Showcase
The Table Of Contents-FAB feature streamlines the essay-taking experience by enabling users to effortlessly navigate through multi-page essay prompts and case libraries at any point in their writing experience. It allows quick transitions between case articles and provides an easy way to return to the top of the assignment prompt or case library at any time.
The new Highlighter/Add a Note tool allows students to annotate and organize key case study information to support their essay arguments. Students can either highlight specific text or add detailed notes to any highlighted section. With the multi-color highlighter, they can color-code their notes for better organization, and the Notes Tab provides a clear, centralized repository of all their notes while students write their essay.
Prioritizing accessibility in our UX design, we implemented several features to support students of all abilities. For instance, students with accommodations for extended time can adjust the timer settings, while those with testing anxiety have the option to hide the timer entirely. Additionally, customizable text size and line height settings allows students to tailor their reading experience to fit their needs.
The introduction of the Self-Grading exercise empowers bar prep students by providing a deeper understanding of the rubrics used to evaluate their essays. By assessing their own work, students can identify weaknesses in their arguments and adjust their writing strategies as they prep for their bar exam. Students will also have the choice to submit their essay to a BARBRI grader for professional evaluation.
Notable Impacts & Outcomes
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Successfully conducted usability testing and student interviews to validate the new Essay UX and accessibility features with student-users.
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With the successful migration of all essay-content tailored to specific jurisdictions (VA, FL, CA, and all 41 UBE jurisdictions), there is continued positive user feedback following the release of the MVP Student-Essay experience.
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Facilitated cross-functional collaboration among technology, learning, content, and operations teams, driving business digitization by aligning efforts toward a unified tech-focused strategy.
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Laid the groundwork for expanding mobile analytics across other BARBRI digital learning products by introducing Mobile Score Reports for Essays.
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Forecasted to support the intake and review of over 125 thousand bar prep essays by Summer 2026 (BARBRI internal data).