Case study

Making contract automation easier to understand

The redesigned Bondify dashboard, with counters for shared documents, comments and edits above a table of recent contracts.

About Bondify

Early-stage startup in Rotterdam building a contract-automation platform for in-house lawyers, law firms and in-house finance teams.

My role

Sole Product Designer, responsible for the platform redesign and design system.

Project overview

Bondify was building a tool for drafting contracts from reusable templates. Answers to questions about a deal could change the text included in the contract.

I joined as the only designer, working with a product manager, several engineers and the CEO. My work focused on redesigning the editor and making those relationships easier to follow.

Two screens from the original interface shown side by side: the template editor and the document list, both crowded with controls. — The interface I inherited

What needed to change

I began by reviewing the product and feedback from demos and user sessions. Setup was difficult. Editing was slow, both because the product was slow to respond and because the workflow was hard to follow.

Interviews with lawyers who had seen Bondify demos highlighted another problem: they struggled to understand the rules behind a template and how those rules affected the contract.

Starting with the editor

I started with the document editor. I grouped variables, comments and version history in a panel beside the document, with a navigation tree on the left for moving between clauses.

The redesigned document editor: a clause navigation tree on the left, the contract in the centre, and the variables list on the right.

The three states of the right panel, side by side: variables, threaded comments, and version history.

Making contract logic visible

The product used variables for terms that changed between contracts. Each variable could have effects that changed other parts of the document based on an answer.

The original template editor: a dense toolbar above the contract text, with a variable creation form filling the right panel. — The original variable form put the effect settings in three checkboxes at the bottom.

Creating a variable: three single-choice answer options with their effects listed underneath, beside a contract with its variables marked in the text. — The redesigned panel lists the effects attached to each answer option.

I also added a canvas showing a variable's answer options and the effects attached to each one. In this example, selecting English law reveals three passages of text in the contract.

The variables workspace canvas: a governing law variable branching into three options, with link and show effects attached to two of them.

Around the editor

I also redesigned the dashboard and the data room where documents were stored. I built a small design system in Figma, based on Material Design, which the engineers implemented in code.

The new dashboard: counters for shared documents, unread comments and new edits, above a table of recent files and their status.

What happened

The redesigned editor, dashboard, data room and variables canvas went live and were used in product demos. Bondify closed before acquiring a customer. I didn't get to test the canvas with users or evaluate the redesign in day-to-day use.

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