Diligent Corporation
Feb 2017 - Sep 2022
Diligent Entities is the world’s leading entity management platform. With 74 FTSE100 companies and over 250,000 users it helps manage and store all corporate records and documents in one centralised location.
While users were familiar with the existing design, they often found it frustrating due to outdated UX patterns. My goal was to address key pain points, add new features and empower our developers to make quicker design updates as we embarked on multi-year redesign journey.
The first step was to better understand the complexity of the product. What was customisable by users and whether it was scalable. There were numerous constraints so design decisions had to be very considerate.
Due to limitations, the new interface would sit alongside and slowly phase out the legacy interface.
I was able to use my front-end development experience to help the dev team update the legacy interface to update wide-sweeping but low-impact visual updates so the two interfaces could live together.
I built a design system that would house all of our components, create cohesion and empower developers to build faster and more consistently. It includes a comprehensive set of design components and guidelines, aligning developers and designers.
A considerable challenge was that the design system had complex components that catered to varying use cases. The components also needed to be scalable, modular and versatile as the roadmap was not set in stone and we were entering uncharted waters.
It was fully responsiveness which for the first time gave users access to the platform on mobiles.
I transitioned our design team to new tools, championing Sketch and then Figma, which was a tricky but welcome addition for both the design team and our developers.
The new design system also included much wider WCAG accessibility compliance, improved data input workflows, updated tables and reporting, introduction of dynamic charting tools and a dashboard to bring content to users. This opened the product to more clients and helped retain ones who had strict accessibility requirements for their organisation.
Based on research findings we addressed a major pain point for users by bringing content they regularly access to the forefront. It made it easier for our users to revisit the platform and greatly sped up their workflow.
Due to a few restrictions we were unable to conduct much research with our end users. I decided to work with our internal support, customer success and product teams, alongside data from user analytics to better understand the user needs and help discover what content we could bring to them as soon as they enter the platform.
We then validated design decisions in surveys and focus groups where users gave feedback that they were pleased with both the content and flexibility of the dashboard to meet their needs.
I worked closely with the global design team, frequently visiting our New York office for workshops, focus groups and to conduct presentations among our teams of designers. This was not only to align on our design system but also our design processes.
Entities was acquired by Diligent Corporation and became part of a wider suite of governance products. There was now an initiative to align all Diligent products to use a single design system.
This introduced many challenges but my team paved the way in showing the global design teams how this transition could realistically take place while being sensitive to our existing users and development team’s resources.
Entities brought many challenges and user needs due to the complex nature of the product. I introduced a versatile design system alongside a plethora of brand new UX flows and features. I worked with several teams globally, spearheading new tools and establishing new processes for the organisation.
Diligent grew quickly during my time and with so many high profile clients, there was a huge responsibility to ensure my output was of the highest standard. I feel privelidged to have learnt a tonne both from the successes and the failures during my time.