Sterling is a leader in background screening and identity services worldwide. I helped their product teams design provide an entirely new experience for their primary platform.
ROLE
Lead Designer
TIMELINE
June 2019 - March 2020
TOOLS
Sketch, Omnigraffle, Invision, UserTesting
Before beginning design work on the new client experience, the Product and UX teams wanted to elicit feedback from a large group of our clients to learn how they used our products and what their pain points were. The customers represented a variety of industries and were chosen for their size, transaction volume, usage of the platform and their willingness to participate.
10 companies were selected, and participated in a moderated job shadow session where the team observed them interacting with the platform while relaying pain points with the product(s) or places where they would like to see improvement.
In addition to these specific job shadowing sessions, there were also several other customers that have provided feedback and enhancement requests through meetings, summits, and CAB events that have helped inform our notion of how our products were being used, and what we needed to do to improve them.
PROBLEM STATEMENT
Our clients need a modern, easy-to-use platform that helps decrease their time to decision.
Understand
The platform redesign will have a large impact on Sterling's business. The end goal is to unify the client experience across all client platforms.
OPPORTUNITY IDENTIFICATION
Below are most of the common pain points from our customers. They fall into three major categories; placing orders, checking status and reviewing reports.
Define
PERSONAS
HR Manager - Manages employees and the overall administration of the Human Resources function. Will sometimes review overall screening progress.
HR Generalist - Day to day management, submitting orders, post hire contact, reviewing results, adding users/admin, actioning results.
HR Specialist - Submitting orders without ability to see results, monitoring candidates.
SUCCESS CRITERIA
An experience that presents a user with items they need to complete rather than having to find the next step to move forward.
Ideate
After defining requirements, we set out to explore solutions. This was a long process were I lead the team in our approach in conjunction with our daily workload.
Over the course of several months, we explored task management UI, Notifications, table displays, filtering controls, progress indicators and many other aspects of a dashboard experience.
Validate
WIREFRAMES
With such a large amount of objectives and infinite possibilities, I proposed dividing the intitial layout exploration between designers. We were able to each create a solid prototype that could be tested against each other in a much shorter time.
OBJECTIVES
TASKS LIST
DESIGN A - FIRST IMPRESSION
WHAT STOOD OUT FIRST?
DESIGN B - FIRST IMPRESSION
WHAT STOOD OUT FIRST?
DESIGN C - FIRST IMPRESSION
WHAT STOOD OUT FIRST?
Definition of order status
INVITE SENT
READY FOR REVIEW
NOT SUBMITTED
IN PROGRESS
ADVERSE ACTION
SUMMARY
ROUND 2 OBJECTIVES
TASKS LIST
DIFFICULTY OF IDENTIFYING ORDER STATUS
Rating: 1 - Very Difficult | 5 - Very Easy
HELPFULNESS OF COLOR PATTERN
Rating: 1 - Very Unhelpful | 5 - Very Helpful
EFFECTIVENESS OF STATUS FILTER
9 participants expected orders to be filtered based on selected status. They preferred the "Mutually-exclusive" approach.
EFFECTIVENESS OF MY TASK FILTER
DESIGN PREFERENCE FOR FILTERS
SUMMARY
FINAL DESIGN
Additional small rounds of validation and testing were ran with clients and on usertesting.com. After much iteration and planning, we arrived at a final design for the dashboard.
Additional features such as "Advanced Filters," and "Filter by Assignee" were added to the experience to meet customer needs.