Birdysplit
Category
DTx Divorce Technologies
Client
BirdySplit
Date
October 25 - December 25
Toolshed
Team
Roles
Lead UX Strategy, UX Research, UI Application Design, Application and Dashboard feature ideation, Branding.
What happens when someone close to you tells you they're getting a divorce?
Do you feel sorry for them? Do you think, "How are they going to manage everything?" Should I help them find a good lawyer? A Good lawyer is crucial during such a case, let me ask some people. What about the kids? How will they manage? She should have at least thought about the kids? How will they manage the costs?
What is Birdysplit?
A SaaS platform designed to improve pain points of Divorce Seekers while connecting them to their Legal Team, aided by a multi-faceted support system, promoting end-to-end assistance and safety for Divorce seekers in India.
Objectives
Creating an end-to-end solution targeting draining pain-points during the divorce process, ensuring decreased reliance on external, unreliable sources.
Prioritise user experience by seamlessly onboarding user and professionals, encouraging professional-to-professional coordination and collaboration for an all-rounded help-team, optimising divorce timelines, uncertainty and stress.
Design a Professional-to-Divorcee data and timeline tracking ecosystem with minimal sleek UI to ensure documentation tracking and verification including Lawyer-to-client Dashboard connection including client options like Document verification, Court hearing tracking and much more.
Whom are we helping?
Divorce-seekers
Divorce-seekers are left all alone when they declare they want to get a divorce. People ask them if they're sure about it, if they have thought it through, reducing their confidence. The problem is, we have not yet designed a system which helps a user navigate their case in a court which is full of pending divorce cases since the past 10 years.
Advocates & Family Law Firms
We wanted to empower competent lawyers and firms to empower their clients by joining and assisting them in their divorce process via documentation tracking and verification, holistic support and information coordination.
Counsellors
Married couples with severe conflicts have reported betterment in marriages after an average of 3 sessions with a counsellors, says an SME. Pre-litigation mediation and counselling go hand in hand in trying to solve the issue of conflicts and disagreements between a couple / two parties.
Financial Advisors
Finances are the first and worst to suffer in a divorce from both parties. To ensure a fair trial, an FA is coordinated and added as a feature to a considering couple.
01
Approaching Divorce
Divorce seekers don't know how to approach and seek help which makes them continue with a helpless marriage, due to fear of inadequate help, societal stigma and fear of judgement.
02
Understanding Lawyers
There is a huge knowledge gap in lawyers in India, which vary from place to place. Approaching a competent lawyer is a tricky task and will make or break your divorce case
03
The Circle of Support
Due to the societal stigma surrounding divorce in many places, even today, a lack of support system is tragically pushing people into helplessness and negative tendencies.
Problem Statement
"Urban Indians navigating divorce have no unified system to manage the legal, emotional, and financial complexity of Divorce process, forcing them to suffer through a fragmented, stressful ecosystem with no coordination and clear guidance at the most vulnerable point of their lives."
We started with how we could make it easier of tier-01 and tier-02 individuals and couples to access competent lawyers, as our biggest problem was to find them too! We understood the deeper problem, which was how could we ease the existing divorce process for these users to help them reach clearer positions in a divorce process.
Changed Problem Statement 3 Times to reach the actual Problem Area.
6 out of 8 Divorce seekers in India are a part of a deeply stigmatised society and family which makes it difficult for them to seek and navigate divorces easily, healthily, safely and freely.
The best way to empower users is by making assistance and help accessible by de-stigamizing divorces, letting you control your own journey, at your fingertips.
UX Research
What are we actually trying to solve?
In India, if someone were to get divorced, they would have to go through a rigorous, spirit breaking procedure which is tiring, humiliating and non-considerate. There are numerous incompetent advocates, unorganised court procedures, inhumane expectations from either of the parties and a long-dragged court order.
We want to ensure that Divorces become comparatively easier to handle after the emotional burden of a breakdown of a marriage.
How is this solution going to help?
We broke down the entire divorce process into steps and milestones to understand where the biggest stress indicators lie and interviewed users who have gone through these problems.
We devised a solution which has Five-step, Three-fold service set-up.
For the first-fold, we help users by providing them with a professional team set-up they can choose from and connect to help of their choice. The financial and emotional aspects of a divorce process go unnoticed and we are trying to empower the user to use these services to increase their chances of reducing lengthy trials, financial resources and emotional burden.
The second-fold is a Tracking System with Legal CRM integrated Dashboard for lawyers and Application for users, that lets the user track the details of their divorce with their Advocates, Counsellors and Financial Advisors while maintaining conversational proof and cordial co-parenting solution through a single application. The professionals can connect their own systems with the dashboard to keep track of their clients or use it as their sole solution for record-keeping.
The Third-fold is the DV solution to keep the users safe in an abusive situation at their home by a help-desk and app-set-up to keep record of the abuse at home and get separated on proof-basis immediately.
This will help the user by reducing uncertainty, confusion and stress, increase efficiency by digital tracking and reduce time-wastage.
Aim
To design a unified service system that lets urban and semi-urban Indians navigate divorce legally, emotionally, and financially, through one platform instead of seven disconnected professionals.
Problem
They thought they would never get divorced but they're suddenly alone and scared with court papers in their hand without help from society and good legal assistance due geographical disadvantages and lack of legal connections.
Divorce seekers face a significant challenge when it comes to inquiring for a divorce.
Divorcees have to go through a series of trials, even during a consented divorce to prove the breakdown of their marriage.
Divorcees have a difficult time tracking their Divorce process, especially if unaware about their rights which makes the entire process difficult for them.
Approach
Translating field research from family courts, practicing advocates, and divorce survivors into a multi-surface service system that didn't exist in Indian legal infrastructure.
Challenges
Divorcees face significant challenges in Indian society due to the saturation of Advocates in the Indian market but without proper legal awareness; this adds to the existing lack of knowledge in individual rights and education.
How is Divorce in India different?
Divorces in India are classified under 5 marriage Acts according to the religion of the divorcees.
These Acts state and define the nature, execution and principles of marriage in Indian court of Law.
The Acts, majorly, view marriage as a sacrament rather a contract/agreement two individuals enter into, autonomously.
It means that precautionary methods like Prenuptial Agreements and other pre-marital contracts may not be admissible in court, as stated by Lawyers. But, there many Advocates who use these agreements to nullify/end marriages through one-way or another. This is why it is important to choose a competent Advocate during Divorce processes in India.
Moreover, due to the sacramental nature of marriage, the court motivates a couple to fix their marriage during the cooling-off period and will try its best to bring them back together.
Breakdown
We start by breaking down the start of divorces, which is marriage and identify the common most patterns observed and legal inputs received in Indian context.
The Paths Diverge
Divorce can be approached in two manners: Consensual and Contested.
Consensual occurs when two parties agree to settle and go their separate paths; whereas, contested is when the two parties cannot come to a common conclusion and wish that the Law to grant their a fair settlement.
User Map
Understanding the users by priority and optimisation.
Competent advocates and divorce seekers make an invincible team once they connect due to which proper match-making procedure is crucial.
Field Visits
To design a unified service system, we paid visits to Adv. Offices, FLC and Law professors to gather statistics, and understand their knowledge position.
Translating field research from family courts, practicing advocates, and divorce survivors into a multi-surface service system that didn't exist in Indian legal infrastructure.
User Interviews
Who?
To gain deeper understanding of the process and its difficulties, we interviewed divorcees, therapists, marriage counsellors, high court lawyers and a mediator, of various backgrounds and financial stances.
Why?
We interviewed them about the perceived situation and how they tried to assist to see what kind of loopholes lie in bridging the gap between help offered and received.
Interview Analysis
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These provided lived experiences, operational workflows, and emotional pain points which helped interpret interviews using a structured tagging system: Breakdown (pain points), Culture (stigma/norms), Insights (deep understanding), Design Idea (opportunity areas), and User Statement (direct quotes).
Affinity Mapping
Affinity mapping helped ascertain the bigger picture of where this entire project was heading.
Work Models
Work models in BirdySplit define the exact duties each actoruser, lawyer, counsellor, financial advisor, ops team performs before, during, and after a hearing, identifying which repetitive administrative tasks (document tracking, context gathering, outcome communication, co-parenting logging, professional activation timing) can be automated or simplified through the platform to reduce error and workload.
Cultural Model
Sequential Model
Insights
By conducting 16 semi-structured interviews and analysing 243 tagged data points, we identified critical inefficiencies across the Indian divorce ecosystem, allowing us to craft a solution that seamlessly integrates into existing legal and emotional support structures.
Divorce Personnel
Breaking down the entire personnel involved in the making a divorce, a success.
Task Flow #01
Show cases the entire divorce process from end to start with decision-making points.
Competitor Analysis
Analysed and compared more than 150+ screens of Family Law software to understand application of Divorce Saas Platforms in Indian context and traced contextual requirements including loopholes in Documenting the process as lawyer.
Insights
-> Indian Advocates don't need to note every detail down, they have their own systems to follow.
-> The problem is connecting Advocate preferences to User requirements.-> Indian users tend to be in the blind regarding court procedures.
-> They lack legal knowledge and are completely dependent on the advocate.
-> This puts extreme pressure and blind faith in whatever the advocate does,
Fragmentation
Solution
BirdySplit is a DMS (Divorce Management System), a part of DTx (Divorce Technologies) aimed at streamlining lawyer-client communication while involving stakeholders like counsellors and advisors to organise the divorce process into a field of accessible information and trackable schedule.
Dasboard
*The following solution is deployed only by me and is my work solely and independently.
Designed the Command-center home view that consolidates case load, hearing schedule, and pending actions into a single glanceable surface (directly responding to field research showing that lawyers lose 30–40% of administrative time context-switching between WhatsApp threads, paper diaries, and mental checklists.)
Takeaway 01
Case Set-up
S01
Structured case intake around progressive disclosure including the act selection auto-populates the correct legal checklist, procedural timeline, and required grounds, eliminating classification errors that field research identified as the single largest cause of petition rejections at family courts.
Takeaway 01
Case Set-up
S01
Case-set-up online for user to add details and connect to their lawyer's dashboard. The set-up is manual due to the sensitivity of the details and all warnings, disclaimers and UX patterns are considered.
Ensures very easy tracking of all information without the hindrances of language barriers, communication problems, literacy background etc.
Takeaway 01
Case Set-up
S01
Converted the document collection phase from an untracked WhatsApp chase into a structured checklist with client-facing plain-language labels and one-tap request flows, addressing the research finding that document gaps are invisible until the hearing date, by which point months have been lost.
Takeaway 01
Case Set-up
S01
Document tracking, verification and checklist before court hearing to ensure smooth functioning and less wastage of time in pending/missing documents.
Takeaway 01
Timeline Tab
S03
Designed a configuration engine that auto-generates case timelines, document checklists, and procedural deadlines from a single intake classification, eliminating manual case setup entirely.
Takeaway 02
Team coordination
S04
Understanding that what worked was role-based access restrictions where the primary trust is the architecture. The counsellor sees emotional context but never financial data or lawyer strategy notes. The financial advisor sees assets but never session disclosures or coercion evidence. The system earns client honesty by guaranteeing compartmentalization.
Designed role-based access control that enforces information boundaries between legal, emotional, and financial professionals, directly from research showing that clients self-censor with counsellors when they fear disclosure to their own lawyer, and that premature financial advice conflicts with evolving legal strategy.
Takeaway 03
Case Notes
S05
Separated lawyer communication into a client-facing plain-language channel and an internal professional assessment layer with immutable audit logging, resolving the research-confirmed tension where lawyers self-censor professional judgment because client-visible and strategy-level notes share the same WhatsApp thread.
Transparency without self-censorship.