Adhering to Government Regulations

The purpose of TraceLink’s compliance applications is to generate supply chain event reports corresponding to the requirements in the country specific to each application. Compliance users can search, view, and manually generate reports based on these supply chain events.

The compliance applications are half the bread and butter of TraceLink’s operations, yet their designs remained inconsistent and frustrating to use for years.

I was tasked with streamlining and templatizing the compliance applications both to enhance the user experience and to simplify the development process for future compliance applications.

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TraceLink Compliance

  • Many individual compliance applications include features that are specific to the laws and regulations of the countries they correspond to, making it difficult to templatize features across all current and potential future applications.

  • The components for the template are restricted to what has already been fully developed in order to cut down on further development debt. No new components may be designed.

  • Individual compliance applications must remain separate for billing purposes.

  • Users want an in-and-out experience as interfacing with compliance reports is most often a simple daily task. No muss, no fuss.

Working with an entirely new design system, I began by examining the previously established version of the Compliance space. The experience was far too simplistic and outdated. More importantly, the a lack of clear actions on the page made the intended workflow difficult to follow.

It was important to retain the basic functionality of the space, but adding clarity and efficiency were at the top of the list for developing the new experience.

Adapting Outdated Technology

Original View of Generate Reports Page

Original View of and Individual Individual Report

Challenges

Lack of Templatization
Report details screens contained enormous variability. No two reports are alike; sections and field labels vary country to country. Building a detailed template was necessary.

Disconnected Software
A major issue with the original compliance applications was that the feature for manually generating reports was housed in an entirely separate application.

Density of Information
Filtering for reports feels immediately overwhelming due to a disorganized array of options.

Renewed Compliance Experience

The new global Compliance experience offered a significantly improved information hierarchy and workflow. Design managed to sell product management on the benefits of compiling all the Compliance experiences owned by a customer into one easily accessible place without having to navigate to several different pages for report management.

Generate & Search Reports

Users access this screen to manually generate event workflow reports and to locate reports that have either been automatically or manually generated and to identify issues..

Report types for every individual compliance application are displayed all together in alphabetical order, ensuring they are as difficult to sort through as possible. Predefined filter buttons help users find what they need much more quickly.

The generate report feature was added to the search page via an action button in the table, which opens an overlay panel with a dropdown of all the available report types. The conditional input field loads upon selecting a report type. The overlay panel also includes a link to the full report details screen.

View Report Details

Users access this screen to view the details of a report in order to verify information, identify issues, or audit shipments.

Building a template for the report details screens required research into the various different report types we already had available across all the compliance applications and logging each section and field label. I compiled the most common sections and fields into the template and collaborated with technical writers to finalize the generic text labels.

The final template is a guideline for designers when designing new reports to determine the information architecture, whereas before it was more of a free-for-all for each report. Designers will still have to determine where new fields will end up but most of the repetitive grunt work has been eliminated from the process.