Company background

Thirdfort is an ID verification provider that partners with financial and legal companies to provide background checks on individuals and companies.

Project Overview

When I joined Thirdfort, I was tasked with redesigning the consumer app (for iOS and Android) from the ground up. The project took almost 2 years of iterating, designing, and collaborating with frontend and backend engineers, product managers, and key stakeholders within the business. As a B-B-C business model, Thirdfort’s entire business depends on the user experience of the app.

This project had many stages, three of which I will highlight:

1. UI redesign

2. UX improvements

3. Continuous Feedback & improvements

Focus 1: Ui redesign

I used my previous experience at Meta to bring in industry standards + best practices for updating UI designs. The branding team had recently completed a branding refresh when I joined, so I took their modules and reinterpreted them into mobile platform friendly components.

Much of this work was graphic in nature, bringing the app up to speed with competitors, as well as considering user interaction patterns, to align interactions with expected behaviours that were intuitive, discoverable, and in tune with existing iOS and Android patterns.

Above is one such example: simplifying the home page to allow more space for task cards, reducing visual clutter, and affording a more lightweight and modern graphic user interface.

Focus 2: UX improvements

The redesign incorporated a complete rebuild of the code structuring the apps. Much of the redesign was, to put it simply, “tidying up” the code and the design patterns, but in a few areas, I pushed to improve the user experience as well. We had enough feedback based on data from customer support ticket volume and app analytics, to identify weak points in the user experience, which I worked to improve.

One example of this, was improving the way users are able to contact support within the app. Previously, the contact support buttons were hidden behind a hamburger menu, and the customer support team was struggling with the volume of calls coming in, since users vastly preferred voice calls to email or chat.

I simplified the navigation by making support a one-touch button at the top of the page on key screens where users would most likely need help, like the Task home page. Tapping the “support” button instantly opens a new screen, automatically starting a conversation with the chatbot, which had a positive affect in two ways.

Firstly, this reduced call volumes, since the chatbot is set up with basic intelligence (pre-loaded responses) to help users self-solve common issues. Secondly, it multiplied the effectiveness of the support team, by allowing them to handle multiple user tickets at the same time. One agent can handle up to three messenger chats simultaneously, compared with only one call at a time.

Results

Since launching the update, we have seen a 4–15% increase in total number of users coming to support through the chatbot (Original designs; 24–25%, updated designs; between 28–40% of total users).

This percentage has a meaningful impact on customer support workload, since the chatbot handles between 80–85% of total user issues that come through; meaning only 15-20% of users coming through the chatbot require human agent interaction to resolve.

Focus 3: Continuous feedback & improvements

Since launching the app redesign and the newly available data from app analytics, cross-referenced with user support ticket themes, the product team has entered a period of continuous product improvement. We have planned updates to improve known user “friction areas” in the app, and have been balancing these with new product features.

Creating an intuitive user experience for all of our users (just look at that age range!) has been the challenge with this project, but I have been amazed at how impactful adopting common ui patterns has been.

I have focused on reducing interactions down to their most elemental form, never sacrificing clarity for style (for example, choosing buttons that say “edit” rather than icons that may be misunderstood), and the results have been incredible: we have had 90+ year old users complete our app journey with no problem!

Of course, the happy path can always be wider, and that’s what we’re working on next..

Future updates include:

• Improving onboarding experience

• Communications with users (in-app and otherwise)

• Making Task screen even more intuitive, based on user feedback

• Evolving the concept of a user to incorporate profile/ account

Consumer Communications Strategy development

After doing a deep dive on user issues, I formed the hypothesis that many of the issues users were facing was due to a lack of information, which we could provide by improving the user experience in the area of communication (messaging + channels) that Thirdfort has with users. This hypothesis has resulted in a handful of product improvements.

Design tooling implementation

When I joined the team, the leadership determining ways of working, was effectively using a waterfall approach. I was an early proponent of more collaborative ways of working, so after trialling Figma, we adopted the tool for the entire consumer experience team, which helped by:

• Providing a single source of truth for all team members

• Enabling engineers to see design work in progress, facilitating collaboration

• Providing the customer support team a dynamically updated map of user flows, reducing duplicative work (they previously had created their own)

And the list goes on..

• Improvement of product documentation and design system implementation.

• Working with marketing to improve known issue areas with automated Gifs and videos that the chatbot can serve up, without needing an agent.

• Supporting other teams, like our client-facing teams, for design needs.