Onect

Three questions to the project team

What was the particular challenge of the project from a UX point of view?
The biggest challenge was uncovering the attorneys' true pain points. While secondary research on legal tools and workflows was an option, we wanted authentic insights from real practitioners. Attorneys bill by the hour and guard their time fiercely, making interviews incredibly difficult to secure. We cold-emailed over 100 lawyers and personally covered consultation fees out of pocket, ultimately gaining invaluable insights from 4 attorneys. What we heard was far more candid than anything available online. Finding the overlap between attorneys' pain points and those surfaced through client interviews became the foundation for our UX solutions.

What was your personal highlight in the development process? Was there an aha!-moment, was there a low point?
Early on, the product had a lot of features, community forums, case databases, and more. The real turning point was realizing we needed to strip it back to what visa applicants and attorneys actually needed: file categorization and AI document scanning. Cutting the noise felt like a risk, but it clarified everything. On the design side, a small but satisfying moment was solving file status communication. Instead of relying on color alone, we introduced unique icons to represent where each file sits in its lifecycle. What made it click was how naturally it integrated, no hierarchy conflicts with surrounding elements, just a cleaner visual language that worked within the existing system.

Where do you see yourself and the project in the next five years?
Each year, 19,000–20,000 applicants pursue the O-1 visa in the United States alone, and globally, demand for visas supporting extraordinary talent shows no signs of slowing. We believe Onect represents the next direction for legal tech: a future where attorneys no longer waste their hours on traditional paperwork, and where clients no longer live in fear inside a black box of unanswered questions. As AI-native platforms reshape every industry, we plan to collaborate with engineers to build a truly AI-native legal platform, secure funding, and expand our reach so that more people around the world can navigate this complex, high-stakes process with clarity and confidence.