Improving vendor assessments on Laika:
Designing a guided flow for user self-sufficiency
This project is under NDA. Below is a summary. Reach out for process and final designs ✌🏼🤍
What
As part of maintaining and proving compliance, our customers need to conduct recurring assessments of all the critical vendors they use. I redesigned the vendor assessment flow in Laika to give novice users necessary information and guidance to complete these assessments resulting in a quicker turnaround.
Why
Vendor management on Laika was not optimized for user or business goals.
Doesn’t accurately represent all the possible ways an assessment can be conducted leading to users doing redundant work
Not connected to controls, the part of the application that lays out requirements (list of documents, evidences etc) for a successful audit
Not clear that assessments and reviews are only required for critical vendors. Criticality should be assigned before conducting assessments
Documents uploaded as part of vendor assessments are not automatically fetched as evidence for controls or audit
User and Business Goals
User
Early to Mid stage startups, always short on resources, both time and people. They want quick results with minimal effort. Hence, I designed for the following:
Guidance over flexibility
Easy to follow clear instructions and templates
Smart automation/communication across features
Business
Reduce service hours by making the platform more self-serve and automate
Retain customers by quicker, painless audits
Design for scale and recurrence
How
Our focus was on incremental improvements that can be shipped and tested over the project period. I sat in on vendor focused CX calls, collected and categorized help center tickets and analyses full story sessions to get a clear picture of the problems.
Working closely with my product manager, I explored different design directions to find the technically feasible ways to provide more guidance for our users. Here’s a list of some of the improvements we made.
Broke down assessments into smaller sections with clear instructions
Listed connected controls and policies that guide audit requirements
Added for context and meta data to the documents
Simplified status options to reduce confusion
Improved assessment questions collaboration with the audit team
Potential Impact
The project is under development. Success will be measured by how we are able to move the following:
Reduce the number of service hours spent on vendor related calls
Drive up the number of assessments in audit conducted on Laika
Continuous Improvement
We still have a long way to go. Following epics have been planned to continue improving the feature. We will pivot based on the feedback we get post launch.
Vendor List improvements to support recurrence and highlight critical vendors
Content Improvements for better templates and UX copy
Introduce a documents repository for all vendors
