Transparency Registry

Use smart design and UX/UI best practices to make a complicated process simple and easy for multiple user types.

UNDERSTANDING THE USERS

When designing the Transparency Registry platform, there were many user types to consider. For simplicity of purpose, these audiences were divided into three main categories – Organizations, Consumers, and Administrators – each of them had their own unique goals and challenges.

Most of the user experience challenges during the project were in this category. We had to overcome a significant hurdle when attempting to decrease the time to value for this user category. Traditionally organizations deal with massive amounts of portfolio data presented in Excel or CSV format. Without having a unified file format standard across the industry, we needed to develop a way for immense quantities of information to be uploaded to the system, mapped to required categories, and verified for accuracy.

Because of the sheer volume of potential debts that need to be uploaded, the process has the potential to take an organization a fairly lengthy amount of time to complete. To help streamline the process, we designed features like batch data review and bulk document upload.

Once this information was in the system, we then needed to develop a way for these users to manage their inventory and make updates over time.

A major value that Transparency Registry offers these organizations is a visual representation of the statistics associated with their portfolios. Having this information available at a glance makes all conversations these organizations have with each other around buying, selling, and regulating the debt easier and more effective.

The next user category is Consumer. These are individual users who can log into the platform and see a record of every debt attributed to them; who currently owns their debt, and a history of who has bought and sold it over its lifetime. Consumers can use the Transparency Registry platform to protect themselves from fraud by verifying that they are paying the right collector and that they are being counted as “paid”.

Another significant value prop of the platform is that because registered debt is verified, it is easier to sell it later for higher margins than the similar debt that is unverified and potentially fraudulent. The process for substantiating the debt registration is robust and involves confirming the legitimacy of the reporting organization as well as verifying the information they provide.

There are many steps required to achieve this. All of them include providing Transparency Registry administrators and the organizations themselves with tools for uploading authentication documents, managing a network of users, and providing messaging and notifications within the platform.

As you can imagine, having an audience that consists of multi-million dollar organizations, small community lenders, top-level government agencies, and individual consumers with loans and mortgage debt provided a unique challenge of its own. How can we design a user interface that positions Transparency Registry both as a friendly, easy to use platform, while also communicates the intense level of security and dependability necessary to earn the trust of major financial institutions? The answer to this question came by focusing on clean, simple design and best UX/UI practices. We aimed to keep design components modern but not cutting edge, and familiar without being dated. The color story is kind and inviting, but still strong and dependable. Behind the scenes, a complicated and intense network of technology and code is working to collect each user’s information and keep it safe and secure. But the user should feel that the process is as simple as checking their bank account online.