Designing a Better Background Screening Experience

Senior Product Designer, 2019 — 2022

In January 2021, I had the opportunity to join the HireRight product design team and take the lead in redesigning Backgroundchecks.com, which is widely recognized as a top provider of background screening services for small and medium-sized businesses.

Kicking off the project with a Lean Canvas workshop

To redesign the core product offering I lead a series of workshops and exercises to reinvent the product from the ground up. I collaborated across the product, sales, and operations teams at Backgroundchecks.com to start to shape a vision for the product in 2022.

Establishing a research foundation: Unveiling customer insights for our redesign

In order to lay a solid groundwork for the redesign process, I initiated internal interviews with the company's operations and sales teams. This allowed me to delve deep into understanding customer needs and interactions. Additionally, I proactively reached out to a carefully chosen group of customers and conducted generative interviews with them. These interviews served as a means to validate the problem areas we aimed to address.

While some of the findings aligned with my initial expectations, the research uncovered a wealth of insights into the various ways customers were compensating for product deficiencies. This deeper understanding shed light on the critical aspects that required improvement and guided the subsequent redesign efforts.

Ad Hoc Personas Development

With customer interviews and the data gathered internally I started to shape ad hoc personas that could feed in th many of the user stories I would write with the product management team. These personas would also be refined and improved over time as we gathered more data from customers.

Competitor Analysis

In collaboration with the product team I conducted extensive competitor analysis to determine where we were in the competitive landscape. This involved evaluating the offerings from a brand, design, and customer experience perspective.

We learned that many of the companies leaping ahead were focusing solely on providing a simplified user experience which was resonating with many new customers.

User Story Mapping

To feed the many user flows that I would design I worked with the product management team, again, to write a series of user stories.

We learned that many of the companies leaping ahead were focusing solely on providing a simplified user experience which was resonating with many new customers.

Designing the Order Flow

One of the first flows we decided to redesign was the new customer order flow. This is one of the most important flows in the product.

Redesigning the Background Report Experience

Background reports are the heart of the product. The experience that exists today models a traditional paper report where the user must consume large parcels of data. In this redesigned approach we focused on introduced key new features that would allow the customer to scan and immediately understand what the status of a report was as well as understanding what was found and the importance of it.

Selected work