Project overview
PASS Technology used to offer an "installable" background screening software for clients in the UK when a new Australian team was assembled to port the outdated solution to a cloud-based SaaS platform.
Information provided here is limited due to a non-disclosure agreement.
The context
Another case of joining the company as the first designer, I started in February 2020 as part of a small Sydney team composed of 3 people in Marketing, 2 Sales, 1 Tester, 1 Product Owner (PO), and myself as the Lead UX Designer. We also had part of the team in the UK dedicated to this project, including 2 Back-End Developers, 1 Product Specialist, and our Head of Product, not to mention management and the rest of the company who were maintaining the "legacy" version.
Most of the development was outsourced to agencies, we didn't have any in-house front-end developers in the entire company, and no developers in the Sydney team. Hence, I became responsible, together with our PO, for managing service providers during implementation, validation, and software delivery.
I joined the team at a busy time and I hit the ground running taking care of prototypes, recreating the sales presentation, doing stakeholder interviews, getting to know the product and the challenges faced.
Example of the interface (list of candidates) when I joined the team (created before my arrival)
The product
The goal of the product was to become a one-stop shop for background screening. A client should be able to request all kinds of checks (e.g. criminal, credit, adverse media, reference) on a specific person. The platform involved an app for screeners (the people requesting checks), an app for candidates (the people submitting their details to be checked), an app for referees (the people providing references for a reference check), other apps to serve as integration with check providers (e.g. identity verification app), and we had the plan to implement an admin app to improve how our Customer Success team managed everything.
When I joined, the team had already a very basic implementation of the new SaaS platform and a plan to implement what they considered to be the most important features. I started contributing to improving the usability of what was there, planning and handling web analytics, as well as coordinating tasks with the product team and service providers.
The image above is an example of the previous "dashboard" containing a list of candidates and the checks requested on each one. Each check also had its own status but users struggled to understand their meaning just based on colours, which meant our team spent a significant amount of time trying to "translate" the interface to them.
Example status flowchart in Miro (left) and status behaviour in Sketch.systems (right)
After identifying this dashboard improvement opportunity, we've worked on the set of statuses among many other tasks. Using Jira for task management, Miro for planning and flow charts, Sketch.Systems (example diagram) for better exemplifying the logic, and Figma for prototyping, here are a few significant improvements to the user experience achieved by our team just regarding the dashboard:
• Easy-to-recognise statuses with icons and better use of colour;
• Overall stats to help users keep track of checks and take action where required;
• Attention required candidates are highlighted and easy to identify;
• Percentage of completion on the candidate level for all combined checks;
• Shortcut link on the candidate name to navigate to the Candidate Details page;
• Replaced phone with email to facilitate candidate recognition;
• Improved search field to work on names as well as emails;
• Improved filters and added possibility of saving custom settings;
Here's the updated version:
The improved interface (list of candidates) as a result of our work
Improving processes
As part of my work to improve our team's processes, make our work more efficient, and aim to develop a Design System, one highlight was that we've started working on each component independently and using Storybook to organise it all. Storybook is a powerful front-end workshop environment tool that allows teams to design, build, and organise UI components (and even full screens) in isolation, without getting tripped up over business logic.
Storybook interface showing a component
Learnings & outcomes
At the "stage 4" (Dedicated UX Budget) of the UX maturity scale, PASS, as a company, mainly viewed UX as a magic potion that's sprinkled sparsely over the user interface to shine it up instead of the recommended best practices which call for frequent and early testing. In my initial 6 months with the company, our Product team had a significant improvement on its approach to UX, the discussions started to replace personal opinions with data, and my direct coworkers could see the value brought by good UX practices like user interviews, customer journey maps, and usability tests.
However, management was too far apart from the product and they were hard to reach. My approach was to slowly present cases where we followed a UX process and achieved good results. Managers started having a better understanding about the product but there was still a long way to go for change in behaviour. Unfortunately, in this case, the best approach is to stay persistent, plant as many seeds as possible, gather allies to fight for the cause, and hope to achieve "stage 5" (Managed Usability) when we can say user experience "made it" in a company.
Overall, in a short period of time, our team was able to significantly improve the user experience and reduce the issues raised regarding users not knowing how to use the platform. We also improved the consistency and quality across the platform, which reduced the amount of bugs in each sprint.
Again, my experience at PASS reinforced my belief that having a multidisciplinary and diverse team working collaboratively is the best way to find good customer-centric solutions. The other learning that keeps being reinforced is the importance of managers being involved with their teams and having a bottom-up decision-making process instead of "forcing" their opinions on their teams.
