PATENT SEARCH IS HARD. HOW TO WIN THE TRUST OF IP PROFESSIONALS IN A NOVEL WAY OF SEARCHING?

IPRally is a Finnish LegalTech SaaS startup.

Founded in 2018 by a patent attorney and two Software engineers, it combines artificial intelligence (natural language processing & deep learning) to make patent search more accurate than the existing Boolean and semantic search tools and more user-friendly. The product is an in-browser app available via licensing B2B model. Customers are Patent offices, R&D intensive corporations, patent attorneys and patent search providers.

I joined in February 2020 as the first UX designer in the company laying the foundations for successful user-centered design through close collaboration with end users and the Commercial as well as the R&D team. My work includes:

Continuous user research, feedback aggregation & systematisation, driving innovation in a cross-team role

Design of features & interactions, communication with the Product owner and developers, QA testing and internal usability testing, UX writing, laying the foundation for a Design system

Mapping user journeys

Leveraging product analytics to improve the experience

Documentation of the product functionality, content writing (newsletters, blog articles)

A comparison of the starting page of the app shows some of the improvements I have worked on during the last two years:

WHAT DO IPRALLY USERS SAY?
How would you describe IPRally to a friend? (User survey, April 2022)

• Innovative, fresh, user-friendly and useful.
• User-friendly AI based patent search
• A unique research tool that does not rely upon Boolean operators and always produces surprising results.
• Dream tool for those who need a quick and high quality search. The service is a real revolution that we all wanted and were waiting for a long time.