Role
UX Researcher
UX/UI Designer
Academic project in collaboration with Ulises GRC
3 weeks
Context
Ulises GRC is a Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) software company based in Barcelona. Their software helps businesses manage risk, comply with regulations, and improve governance.
Ulises GRC is a robust and complex solution that covers a wide range of functionalities. It is designed to address serious and delicate business challenges.
Challenges
Scheduling virtual meetings: We had to be flexible with our schedules and meet virtually due to the location of the UX team and Ulises GRC.
Limited resources: Working with a specialized target required us to do extensive research and collaborate closely with the Ulises GRC team, but we had to be creative to find ways to do so with a limited budget.
Evolving UX processes: Ulises GRC is still developing its UX processes, so we had to be adaptable and willing to show them how important is the user experience for their product.
Ulises GRC needs
Based on 2/23 law, all companies with more than 50 employees have to implement a whistleblowing channel.
This means that for 2024 Ulises GRC could increase the sales of their software.
Ulises GRC offers live demos to show their clients how the software works, this costs a lot of time and effort to the PM and the founder. And now, they want to implement a Free-Trial version for their software.They recently implemented a whistleblowing channel and they've been receiving a lot of emails asking about how this channel works or asking for a new live demo.
They need a solution that explain the whistleblowing channel so they can save time avoiding live demos. Now that we know exactly what they need, we started the research phase focused on it.
It's a way for employees to report wrongdoing to their employer anonymously. They can be a valuable tool for promoting compliance and ethics within organizations. They can help to create a safe and ethical workplace for all employees.
Whistleblowing channels can help to:
Identify and prevent wrongdoing before it becomes serious.
Create a culture of ethics and accountability within an organization.
Help to reduce the risk of legal liability for organizations.
Some examples of the types of wrongdoing that can be reported are:
Fraud
Corruption
Discrimination
Harassment
Research
Before the first virtual meeting with the stakeholders, we decided to invest our time in desktop research. We had to understand how this unknown market worked to be prepared.
Due to limited resources, we had to make assumptions and then double check them with the stakeholders.
We understood how important this role is and how fast it is growing. Statista (March 2022)
We could double check what competitor they look up to and who exactly is their target for this project, the compliance officer.
On the other side, we found that Ulises GRC was not the only one working with live demos.
Competitors provided by the stakeholders
We're just missing who's going to be using the whistleblowing channel, we knew that every employee can use it but Who's going to manage it?
That was other point we could double checked with the stakeholders.
Compliance Officer
They are in charged of receiving and managing the intern complaints. These people are lawyers or managers, most of the time. This is a very specific user, so we decided to open a little bit the scope to understand how people deal with complicated softwares on their daily work routine.
At first, we had the chance to recruit 5 people to do interviews or user testing, but we decided to go keep those people for the user testing. So, we recruited 5 people to interview them, they were involved somehow in GRC market. They were lawyers, managers or they used complicated softwares.
What are Ulises GRC users complaining about?
Don't remember: Users said that they understood the software by the live demo, but for the whistleblowing channel it's hard to remember because their first complaint appeared after a long time.
Need a hand: Users waste time or get stuck when they don't know how to solve it themselves.
Response time: Due to a high amount of complains, Ulises GRC team couldn't solve every case in less than 48 hours.
Onboarding
It is like a roadmap for new users to get started with your product. It's about making the first steps as easy and enjoyable as possible so that users quickly understand the value of your product and start using it regularly.
We found some types of onboarding:
Product tours
Walkthrough
Pop-ups
Meta onboarding
We aligned what ULISES GRC wanted to implement, technical limits and what the user has complained about. And, we found that the Walkthrough suited into Ulises GRC needs.
What is the real problem?
How can we improve the user experience when they recommend content through the app?
Ideation
Before we started designing, we selected some walkthrough examples to get inspiration from.
We discussed about what we can get from each example.
We found in Zoho a simple onboarding solution.
Logitech offers a modern solution, they made it clear and clean.
After some emails with the team, we could set a meeting to show them the first impressions of what we had in mind.
But first, we had to start an ideation session. We started to wireframe ideas on Mid-Fi, we used Modals and Walkthroughs.
Ideas of the ideation session.
Presenting ideas
Based on the Ideation session, we decided to work on those three ideas and improve them. We decided to prototype them and prepare a presentation. We did a virtual meeting with the stakeholders to show them our ideas in Hi-Fi and we explained the 3 ideas to them.
In this meeting, we talked about what we thought Ulises GRC needed as a posible solution and we listened their ideas to match our concepto to theirs.
Due to the meeting, Ulises GRC team and the Design team agreed to work on the third idea considering the feedback we got through this meeting. This feedback was based on content, they wanted to add the "Informes" section to this idea.
Also, they wanted to use a different color, similar to their website. And, they wanted to add a something that could remind the user that they could check the onboarding again on an specific section.
After the meeting, we worked on the improvements, gathered from the feedback we got, to make sure it's all set to start the usability testing sessions. For the user testing, we had to work with limited resources, but we were told 5 real users could participate for the user testing session, so we just had one shot and we'll save it for later.
I recruited five users to do the first usability testing based on Nielsens methodology.
“After the fifth user, you are wasting your time by observing the same findings repeatedly but not learning much new.” Jakob Nielsen on NN Group article
In this first testing, we gave the user context about Ulises GRC and the whistleblowing, we asked them to imagine they're complaint officers in a new job and they wanted to find out what they can do with this channel.
What are going to do with the results?
Add a hotspot to highlight the entry point
Work on the first modal, the copy and the way we show it.
Replace the graphics step.
Second Usability Testing
In this testing, we used our shot to recruit five users and clients of Ulises GRC for accurate results. We alse gave them context about what we' were working on, we asked them to imagin that they're new users of the whistleblowing channel.
We knew they would bias their answers cause they've already use the whistleblowing channel, but that was precious because they felt free to gave us responses about the channel based on what we showed them.
We found that we had to add some small changes, but the first modal was our constant mistake. We decided to make it minimalist, make the copy easy to read and understand. On the other hand, due to the changes Ulises GRC wanted to implement, we changed the main color to a lighter blue because they had in mind to change from the bottom and the first element was the whistleblowing channel, they've already started with small changes on their website, the whistleblowing channel is different from the other elements.
The other significant change was to show the graphics on the first modal and not as a step, this decisions was made because we decided, based on the feedback we got in this testing, to show only the steps to manage a complaint. We also worked on rethinking some copywriting we used to explain a step, trying the prototype with this specific target was so helpful to detect the exact points we could work on.
Final prototype
Don't forget to fullscreen to try the prototype :).
Personally, this project marked a turning point as a UX Designer. Working side by side with my teammate and facing new challenges that drove us to constantly learn new things and how the best solution not always fits in the real world
We discovered a whole new universe, the GRC, and how significant this is. We had to worked carefully with all the data and changes we made because intern complaints are totally serious.
User-centered design is essential for creating effective and meaningful experiences.
On the other hand, I totally believe that positive attitude is mandatory to be a UX Designer and this project taught me that. At the beginning of this project, we couldn't set an hour to virtually meet because the CEO and the PM were busy and facing some troubles that made it impossible.
We could've complain about the limited resources we had and keep waiting to finally virtually meet to talk about the brief and wait for and explanation of what Ulises GRC is but we decided to get off the ground and start doing something about it.
