Editor’s Note: The Aero Advance Access program kicked off last month, and we shared how it’s going during the Relativity Fest London keynote. With those insights in mind, we’re republishing this article with updates and a new video featuring some of the feedback we’ve heard so far from early users.
If you joined us in Chicago for Relativity Fest last fall, you know that we talked a lot about empowerment—empowering communities, empowering organizations, and empowering individuals.
But, ultimately, you can’t truly empower the e-discovery community without making it easy for everyone to take advantage of RelativityOne. That’s why last week, we announced a new pay-as-you-go pricing model that will make it easier for everyone to use our powerful and comprehensive SaaS platform.
But making software more accessible isn’t just about price point. It’s about what you can do once you’re in there.
So today, I want to talk about the second aspect of making it easy for all users to benefit from RelativityOne: Aero UI.
What We Expect from UX
Great user experiences are a part of everyday life. Whether we’re sending a text message or streaming a TV show on Netflix, we all expect technology to be fast, easy, and seamless.
The problem is that the nature of e-discovery and the law is complex. Data rapidly grows, deadlines are always tight, and each matter must be expertly resolved in an ever-evolving landscape of laws and regulations around the globe. Our customers depend on Relativity because it’s powerful and secure enough to handle these complexities. But, historically, that power and security has come at the cost of the simpler things—that expectation of what great technology should feel like. That baseline user experience we’re all accustomed to.
With Aero UI, power and simplicity are no longer mutually exclusive. Instead, RelativityOne is simply powerful—the most advanced technology in the business, wrapped in an intuitive interface.
Building a Simply Powerful Product
We began laying the groundwork in 2018 to make RelativityOne the most powerful, secure, and intuitive platform and suite of applications in the industry. We initially focused on improving time-to-value by measuring the human effort (e.g. clicks, scrolls, linear mouse feet, and time) required to complete numerous critical workflows and tasks in the product. Since then, we have tripled the size of our UX team and built out the muscle to transform our user experience. Today, we have hundreds of team members dedicated to designing, building, and testing Aero UI.
And Aero is more than just a fresh coat of paint. We’ve modernized our entire architecture to deliver improvements across the platform product that will streamline the way you work with RelativityOne. These include:
- Modern Aesthetics: We’re restyling pages across the platform to look and feel more contemporary, including improving their usability through clearer button definition, fewer items on the screen by default, and more obvious page hierarchy.
- Light-Speed Performance: We believe performance is a critical part of user experience, and we want to make it as fast and easy as possible for users to navigate RelativityOne. That’s why we’ve spent a lot of time refining our architecture to improve speed and performance across the platform.
- Next-Gen Review: We’ve modernized the viewer to offer you faster performance and navigation throughout your review, including faster doc-to-doc speeds and cleaned-up icons and text.
- Workflow-Based Navigation: We want to make it simpler for users to know where to go next. Improving navigation between pages is an important aspect of that. In Aero UI, administrators can configure bucket tabs into categories so that users can easily access the tabs they need for a given workflow.
- Automated Workflows: With more than a dozen different triggers and actions in Aero, RelativityOne admins can create their own automated workflows, including templatizing them so new workspaces immediately begin automating. These automated workflows will eliminate manual steps, waiting, and “babysitting” time completely.
- Next-Generation API Coverage: To harness the potential of a simply powerful platform, we’re introducing updated API coverage across the product interface, including brand new viewer APIs so you can create unique review experiences.
The industry knows that RelativityOne is a powerful and secure product. With Aero UI, it becomes more accessible to every user—technical or not—so that they can wield that power in more constructive ways. We’re dedicated to giving you a platform that has the most powerful features in the industry, smartly served up when you need them. The rest of the time, you have a simple, intuitive product that lets you focus on the work at hand. It’s simply powerful.
What’s Next?
In April, we delivered the first cut of Aero to customers in our Aero Advance Access program. This select group is the first to experience the UI and has provided continuous feedback that we’re using to quickly iterate on our development.
They were just as eager to get their hands on Aero as we were to share it with them.
“I often speak to our clients about how important feedback is to Relativity and the key role it plays in their culture and product development,” says Jenna Rooney, director at Innovative Litigation. “The Aero Advance Access program is showcasing that dedication to improvement and providing an opportunity for the Innovative Litigation team and our clients to have a direct hand in shaping the future of RelativityOne.”
Joe Obermaier, e-discovery and information governance lead at Broadcom, shared a similar sentiment.
“As an early adopter of RelativityOne, we’re excited to work closely with the Relativity team on the rollout of the Aero UI,” he said. “This new interface shows Relativity’s continuous commitment to improving the product. That, along with the Advance Access Program, also shows their willingness to work with their customers to achieve that goal.”
During the Relativity Fest London keynote, we were able to share a little of what our early users have experienced so far. Check out this video to hear more.
With Aero already in customers’ hands, our UX team is hard at work talking to early users and the broader community to better understand how we can help you accomplish tasks faster—and better enjoy the environment you work in every single day.
We’re super appreciative of all the folks who provided feedback along the way, and we look forward to hearing more insights as the year progresses. Together, we’re making Aero UI and RelativityOne simply powerful.
