Posted by Dan Hodges, managing director of Legal Futures Associate Conscious Solutions
Hodges: Good UX should mean your site is accessible too
When a prospective client lands on your website, they are not calmly browsing. In most cases, people engage law firms when they are dealing with something stressful and when they need help fast, such as a dispute, a diagnosis, a divorce or a death in the family.
A widely cited Ericsson neuroscience study measured what happens to people physically when digital experiences make them wait.
Using EEG, pulse monitors and eye tracking, researchers found that delays in loading content under time pressure raised users’ heart rates by an average of 38%, increasing stress levels by a third, on a par with sitting a maths exam or watching a horror movie.
Your website visitor is likely already carrying stress before they arrive. If your site adds to it rather than relieves it, you have likely lost not only a prospective client but, very possibly, the marketing spend that got them there in the first place.
The first ten seconds decide everything
Users make an almost instant decision about whether to stay or leave. In that window, they need three things to be obvious: what this page is for, what they can do next, and why they should stay.
Nielsen Norman Group’s analysis of visit durations found that users often leave web pages within 10 seconds, so to gain their attention, you must demonstrate your value proposition quickly.
Effective user experience is not about having the most sophisticated website in the sector. It is about removing the moments of hesitation that give a stressed, time-poor visitor a reason to close the tab and call someone else instead.
Where enquiries are won or lost
Most of what determines whether a visitor becomes an enquiry has nothing to do with how good your firm is. It comes down to whether the website makes it easy for them to get in touch.
That means:
- Simple, jargon-free navigation, with no more choices than necessary;
- Content broken into short paragraphs, clear headings and bullet points;
- Trust signals, such as reviews, accreditations and real people; and
- Contact forms that ask for the minimum amount of information necessary.
That last point matters more than firms tend to think. A visitor filling in a contact form has already decided they want to speak to you, and every unnecessary field is a chance to talk them out of it.
If you are paying for the traffic that reaches that form, a clunky form is a firm paying twice: once for the click, and again for the enquiry that never comes.
Good UX and good accessibility are part of the same conversation
Much of what contributes to a website having good user experience (UX) is also what makes it accessible.
Fast load times, clear headings, simple navigation, well-labelled forms and enough colour contrast to read comfortably all serve the same aim: reducing friction for a person using your site. Get UX right, and you have gone a long way towards making the site accessible too.
Yet most firms are still falling well short of both. WebAIM’s ongoing analysis of the top one million homepages found that 96% have at least one detectable accessibility failure, a figure that has barely moved in recent years despite growing awareness of the issue.
That gap is rarely deliberate. It is more often the result of treating accessibility as a separate, later-stage compliance task, rather than as part of the same UX work already underway.
What actually works, and why it pays for itself
Closing the accessibility gap doesn’t need to be complicated.
Regular auditing, manual testing with disabled users, and an honest accessibility statement will catch what automated checks miss, and training the wider team means the fix outlasts any single project.
Do this well, and it isn’t a separate cost sitting alongside good UX. It’s the same investment, extended a bit further.
Designing for everyone is designing for more people
The combined spending power of disabled people and their households in the UK is estimated at £274bn a year, and yet research from Scope found that 73% of disabled online shoppers have experienced barriers on more than a quarter of the websites they visit.
A well-designed website that is fast, clear and easy to navigate naturally works to make your law firm’s content accessible to a larger group of people, and in turn exposes your services to a larger client base.
The UX standard law firms should be holding themselves to
There’s one main takeaway from this blog post: friction costs you clients. Whether that friction shows up as a spike in someone’s heart rate, a shortcut that only solves a third of the problem, or a slice of the market you are quietly turning away, it’s working against your law firm.
Good UX is not a ‘nice-to-have’; for most visitors, it is the first and only impression of that expertise they will ever get.
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