Designing a powerful compliance solution for the world's leading companies

1. The challenge
2. Our goal
3. My role
4. Research
5. Design principles
6. Design explorations
7. Visual approach
8. Design solution
9. Outcome

Research & discovery

Starting with the Jobs to Be Done approach

Instead of jumping straight to solutions, we used the Jobs to Be Done (JTBD) framework to understand the core needs and motivations of our users. This framework focuses on the "jobs" users are trying to accomplish, giving us valuable insights into the goals they're trying to achieve.

To put this into practice, we started by interviewing users of our platform. We asked them about their daily experiences and the challenges they faced. This helped us create user personas that reflected the real people using the platform and their specific needs.

Pain points we discovered

• Regulation overload and figuring out which regulations to prioritise is a constant struggle
• Keeping up with the latest regulations feels impossible, often leaving us scrambling to catch up
• Gathering and exporting safety certifications is a time-consuming nightmare due to them being scattered across different teams

When we gathered as much data as we could, we created job stories in this simple format below.

Using Storymapping as a design tool

Storymapping is a powerful way to map and visualise the user's journey through your product or service, in a visual and dynamic manner. Taking the job stories as a base, I diagrammed many possibilities because of what we learned about users' motivations. I outlined the steps the user might go though, plus issues that arise and then add behavioural techniques that will keep users on track.

From user needs to design research

After collaborating with the wider team on the user story maps, I shifted my focus to the conceptual design phase. Here, I looked into established design patterns and best practices to find inspiration. To stay up to date, I like to explore academic databases for new research in psychology and other relevant fields.

Some of the resources I found valuable were the Nielsen Norman Group, ACM Library, and Baymard Institute. As I explored, I challenged myself with design questions. For instance, I looked at how to make selecting items from a massive list more efficient, how to display endless product lists without images effectively, and what user behavior strategies could be used.

Design explorations

The best way to display lists

The question was 'how to list many items in a readable manner, that is easily scannable and searchable?'

Cards versus lists

I tried many lists based approaches. From early feedback, users wanted to see as much data as possible in each row. I prototyped different variations in InVision and showed them to a select group of users. The feedback was that using cards felt more efficient than rows. Also, the fact that keyword search was the first thing user said they would do made the choice easier to make.

I created abstract wireframes based on what the main content would be. The darker, heavier elements, the higher in the hierarchy and importance the content is.

I settled on an expanded card list approach for the MVP. Search was easy to find and always expanded and was live filtering to make the experience feel responsive. I split the sub navigation into sections, allowing the user to filter by less accessed sections more easily.

Creating an efficient wizard

By far the most challenging design was how the user selects a large range of items easily and efficiently. I did some deep research on academic sites, looking into the most effective ways of selecting from large lists. Going back to first principles, I wanted to keep things focused, hiding the inherent complexity.

Best selection technique

I decided out of the many display options to go for tree like menu, and without using the conventional pattern of checkboxes to keep the visual as light as possible. There was enough affordance to let the user know that these rows were clickable. Since there was not a lot of information in these rows, I kept it to a list based view.

Step through interface

As there are different types of content to add, I used a step through the interface. It might reduce the speed of completion, but going back to first principles again, it focused on the job at hand. We tested early prototypes on users and found that they welcomed the step through approach.

Finally, I found from user testing that the step through worked well for adding disparate and complex types of data and that the slight reduce in speed from a scrollable one-page list worked by allowing the user to make better decisions about what items to include. We completed the final step through version and added product imagery to boost recognition.

Design solution

Bringing it all together

After more testing with hand-picked and engaged users and the internal team, we felt we had a strong user flow and end product.