Redesigning the Compliance Experience
Transforming a manual compliance process into a transparent, user-focused digital platform.
SERVICES
Design Strategy
User Research
Market Research
Interface design
DELIVERABLES
Product Tracking Plan
MVP Launch
Design System
ROLE
Senior Product Designer
DURATION
8 Months
TEAM INVOLVED
Ricardo Tinoco
Project Manager
Huyen Hoang
UX Researcher
Celso Vale
Engineer
Victor Carvalho
Engineer
Raphael Sattler
Engineer Manager
Overview
USDM supports life sciences companies in bringing products to market by managing the complex world of compliance. Our goal was to move away from a phone- and email-based system and create a seamless digital experience that empowered users to track, manage, and complete their compliance workflows independently.
The Challenge
USDM's process lacked transparency and relied heavily on manual communication, leading to confusion, delays, and lost documents. Clients often didn’t fully understand the scope of USDM’s services, and the company risked losing competitive advantage to more digitally mature competitors.
🤷🏻 ️Value Proposition is not clear
Research and Insights
We conducted qualitative research with 8 users and held stakeholder workshops to understand the full scope of user frustrations and business needs.
Top Findings
🤷🏻
Lack of understanding of USDM’s full capabilities
Costumers, don’t understand all the depth and breadth of the services USDM Provides
🔍
They only see USDM as a validation support vs a one-stop shop for compliance and technology support
📞
Users want to monitor their compliance progress and track requirements, the current process lack visibility
👁️
Users wanted real-time status visibility
The lack of visibility makes difficult to track required documents, pending updates and approvals
Goals
Consolidate all customer deliverable information into a single, interactive dashboard for streamlined access and visibility.
Enhance transparency by implementing a streamlined document management system, document status indicators, automated notifications, and reminders to keep users informed at every stage of the process.
User Personas
Based on this research, we developed User Personas for both internal and external users.
Design Process
After gathering and sharing all insights with the team, we created a design brief ad vision to summarize the user problems and our proposed solutions. This approach enabled me to present a clear roadmap to the leadership team, receive valuable feedback and align the team on our goals.
Feature Prioritization
With feedback from leadership, alongside engineers and product management, we defined and prioritize the user stories, this help us to break down the project into manageable phases, ensuring the most critical features we developed and deployed first.
Gathering Inspiration
Audited similar platforms focused on document workflows, visibility, and transparency.
Early Explorations
Explored low-fidelity concepts centered around status visibility and simplifying complex flows.
Initial Designs
Initial designs focused on understanding and improving the compliance flow by focusing on transparency and visibility. Later on, we provided tools for direct communication between users and their corresponding USDM agents.
Design Critiques
Collected feedback from PMs, engineers, and stakeholders to iterate on usability and clarity.
Final Designs
Final designs introduced a more cleaner layout and increased status visibility for the user, the result of feedback provided by the team landed on the following:
Key Features
Compliance Status
A status report of your compliance status is always visible when visiting the platform providing visibility for the users.
Products and Service Dashboard
The Dashboard shows active compliance products and allows users to easily add or switch tools as needed.
Events Calendar
The Event Calendar keeps USDM users informed about upcoming science and health industry events.
Resources
Relevant health industry news will be regularly featured on our blog, keeping users informed and up to date on important health topics.
File Upload Control Center
The File Upload Center lets users easily upload, access, and download their files anytime for simple content management.
IS Health Check
The IS Health Check offers quick compliance insights and improvement guidance.
Design System
To support consistency and scale, I created a foundational design system with:
A unified color palette and type system
Reusable components (cards, inputs, buttons, tags)
Developer-ready specs and documentation
This enabled the engineering team to move faster while keeping the experience cohesive.
Impact
Adoption and Sentiment
After launch, Adoption of USDM Compliance Dashboard registered a 20% increased in the following 3 months. Users were excited and pleased with the new experience.
Reduced Time to achieve Compliance
The simplified UX process and improvements on the status visibility reduced the time to achieve compliance up to 35%.
Higher User Satisfaction
After launch, user satisfaction scores improved by 35% particularly among users who were frustrated by the lack of visibility on the compliance process.
USDM Agents had time for bigger tasks
The redesigned improved transparency, leading to a 28% reduction in user calls about compliance status allowing Agents to focus more on user success.
Challenges
⚖️ Cross-Functional Alignment
Aligning stakeholders from UX Research and Engineering required clear communication, collaborative workshops, and feedback sessions.
🎯 User needs as the main focus
We avoided misaligned features by focusing on the main user pain points, which helped us prioritize visibility, transparency, and compliance.
🔄 Changes in Team Structure
Progress was impacted when engineering resources were shifted to other teams, slowing momentum and challenging the continuity of the project.
🎨 Introducing a Design System
Early stakeholder alignment made it possible to build a scalable design system quickly, helping developers move faster while staying consistent with design standards.
Conclusion
This project reinforced the importance of cross-functional collaboration in shaping product decisions. Each team member brought valuable perspectives that were essential to delivering a well-rounded and scalable solution. Consistent user research helped us stay focused on the real pain points, avoiding unnecessary complexity and keeping the user at the center of our decisions.
What I appreciated most was the continuous iteration process—driven by both user and team feedback—which played a key role in achieving a strong user experience and meaningful business results.
Building the design system was also a valuable learning experience, teaching me to think beyond immediate needs and consider the long-term scalability and consistency of the platform.
Let’s Collaborate
Feel free to reach out if you’d like to chat about, you can reach me out at:
sebastian5000@gmail.com