Black Monolith | International Trade Administration

My role

Data visualization and design consultant

Background

APEC created Cross-Border Privacy Rules (CBPR) to provide a secure, trusted, efficient means of transferring personal information across international borders. As part of this program, they created a certification that verifies that companies have a working knowledge of internationally recognized data privacy protections.

Companies can obtain the CBPR certification through Accountability Agents, who are recognized by APEC and trained to assess CBPR compliance.

Business problem

The US International Trade Administration (ITA) wanted to create a unified software system for Accountability Agents and applicants alike to streamline the application process and increase the likelihood of the program's success. This system would need to guide applicants through the application process and allow Accountability Agents to manage a large number of applicants, helping them clarify or improve their policies.

Solution

With user research unavailable for this project, I used UX best practices including light gamefication based on the Octalysis framework. My experience in B2E UX enabled me to focus on points of friction and reduce decision fatigue.

Clear to-do list design with light gamefication

The large number of questions - usually distributed amongst various team members - inherent in these application forms inevitably creates an additional workload of managing completion status and assigning responsibility. Clearly depicting the status and assignee of each question with a subtle color coding for user motivation ensures high completion rates, meaning more certified organizations and higher profits for the certifying body.

Clean, easy to understand interface

The decision tree for users is considerable, with not only many questions, but some open-ended answers as well. More color coding to indicate status, with completed questions faded out, action items in bold colors, and Z-axis utilization to draw users' attention where necessary reduces decision fatigue.

Combining detailed and high-level views

For the certifying body, the agents are able to view the status of applications. Rather than a crude progress bar, a more nuanced view of the status of each application, where each question is represented by a color-coded cell, shows not only the overall progress of applications, but where effort and challenges occur. This enables agents to identify problem areas and prioritize work.

Explaining complex data structures to business users

Amperity works by comparing several large data sets and identifying rows (customers) that appear to represent the same individual. To communicate this abstract concept to business users who aren't data scientists, I visualized each database as a node. The more concordance between databases, the darker the line that connects them. There is also a much simpler graphic that shows the degree to which the Amperity Stitch function has eliminated duplicates across the total data set and created a unified picture of a company's customers.