A little way down the home page on its new website, FTI Technology has an unrecognisable blotch of pixels with the tagline “See what you’ve been missing…”. As you scroll past it, the pixels resolve into the face of a tiger lurking in the undergrowth. FTI also has a similar one, which caught my eye at LegalTech, in which something in the water – a log perhaps – resolves into a shark when you see it properly.

It is a good metaphor for eDiscovery, where the ability to focus quickly on the things which matter saves money and identifies both risk and value promptly. The tiger and the shark clearly represent risk and you would rather spot that sooner than later; the same applies to value – if you have in your possession the document which may win your case than it is better to find it quickly.

The design of websites, like design of eDiscovery software, has changed, moving away from conventional navigation menus and vertical hierarchies and from the imperative to fit as much as possible onto the page, and into a down-and-across approach with lots of colour, big pictures and plenty of white space. The trick, and it is not necessarily easy, is to preserve a navigation flow which allows the user to absorb it all. FTI’s Ringtail has long offered one of the more attractive user interfaces and the most recent version carried on this exercise to very good effect. FTI’s website is now achieving the same thing.

A company like FTI Technology needs to display information in multiple dimensions – it has software with functions and benefits to display; it offers a range of services based around the use of that software; it needs to approach the explanation via the tasks which the software and services are designed to help with. All these things are different in kind yet inter-related and the website needs to make it easy to get to anywhere from anywhere.

Since the whole point of my commendation is that the new FTI Technology website is easy to navigate, I don’t need to walk you through it. Take the Software button and follow any of the paths Find Facts Fast, Easy to Use or Visual Document Review. They each lead to the appropriate place in a master guide to every aspect of Ringtail with big illustrations and logical walk-throughs, while allowing to get to the other options easily.

There is some good messaging: the page headed Visual Predictive Coding has the subheading No third party plug-in, or PhD in Statistics required; the Visual Analytics page builds on the See what you’ve been missing tag. Lots of pictures pick up on the marketing message that colour matters when trying to discriminate in discovery.

The whole thing serves as a primer as to what you expect from modern, visual eDiscovery software and, as I say, reflects the same imperative as it appears in Ringtail itself. Navigate round the website and see for yourself.

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