I redesigned how thousands of law firms track their serves
Role
Director of Product Design (Player/Coach)
Timeline
July–December 2025
The context
Proof handles service of process: the constitutional requirement that someone must be formally notified when they're sued. Our platform connects thousands of law firms with a nationwide network of process servers. These serves often involve urgent, emotionally charged cases where uncertainty quickly erodes trust.
Client experience redesign @ Proof
Why it mattered
30%
of chat messages from clients were asking for status updates
>$50k annual spend
high-value clients churned primarily because of poor visibility
30 days
was the retention window - confusion killed momentum
Where we started
The job details page (the core client experience) hadn't been touched in years.
We knew it needed work, but it was a big undertaking with lots of stakeholders and opinions. We agreed to take a phased approach, starting with one widget: chat.
Chat is a key differentiator. Clients can message process servers directly. But every message creates a review task for ops. The business goal was to reduce task volume. The design question: why are clients chatting so much?
The "old" job details page before the redesign
What research revealed
The issue wasn't chat. It was clarity.
I used Claude to classify 1,000+ chat threads by intent, identifying 16 distinct message categories. The pattern was clear…clients weren't chatting because they wanted to chat. They were asking the same question over and over: what's happening with my job?
The problem wasn't the chat experience. It was that we weren't telling clients what they needed to know.
Used Claude to analyze chat threads at scale.
There was a structural problem
When jobs get redispatched (natural disasters, server availability, access issues, client requests) our system created a brand new page. New job. New chat. New history. Clients with complex serves had 2-10 separate job pages to navigate. Which one was current? Where should they message?
That's not a product experience. That's a breakdown of trust.
Old model (left) vs new model (right)
The reframe
"Jobs" were an internal concept that made sense for ops but meant nothing to clients. We needed a new mental model: one serve, one story, regardless of how many reassignments happened behind the scenes. The serve became the container.
The new data model for serves
The solution: Three experiences that remove uncertainty
Job tracker
Answers one question: is this progressing the way it should? Instead of binary status labels, it surfaces contextual health indicators (on track, needs attention, at risk) and explains why. Attempts count in aggregate across the full serve. Risk surfaces early, not after failure.
Unified history
Reassignments no longer reset the conversation. A single timeline preserves all attempts, chats, and documents regardless of how many times the serve changes hands.
Address intelligence
Many failed attempts came from address quality issues. We integrated Melissa Data to validate addresses proactively and surface risks before dispatch.
Enabling ops without rebuilding the platform
Client visibility required ops to see the same unified context. Stakeholders proposed redesigning the entire ops platform.
I recommended a narrower approach: a global job selector that surfaces key context without changing existing workflows. Ship value now, defer the full redesign.
Ops-facing global job/serve selector, with additional context on hover
Outcomes
Collaboration & execution
I partnered closely with engineering to define the data model, edge cases, and interaction behavior, reviewing implementations for fidelity and feasibility. I worked with the PM to pressure-test scope, sequence work, and decide what not to build - prioritizing clarity and adoption over feature breadth.
And I collaborated closely with my amazing design team; defining the system-level approach, setting design direction, making scope and sequencing decisions, and ensuring the final experience shipped as a coherent, end-to-end system.
Shaun Tan — Product Designer
Led structural design and iteration across complex states. Owned the job tracker structure, status variants, and edge-case exploration, as well as the chat experience.
Gabe Hernandez — Product Designer
Owned the detailed UI work across the experience, including component styling, borders, shadows, hover and focus states, spacing, and typographic refinement.
Just one of many pages from months of iteration.
Key takeaway
Clients didn't need more features or more communication - they needed to understand what was already happening. By redesigning the client experience around a continuous story (and enabling internal teams to support that truth), we reduced confusion, restored trust, and created a scalable foundation for retention.
New Serves table built with AG Grid