Scott Liang

While I spend most of my time these days working in UX and UI, a piece of my heart still lies in environmental design. Specifically, I remain deeply interested in the impacts—from the subtle to the immense—that environments have on our health and happiness.

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Unfortunately, this area is still rather fringe, with only a fraction of governments, academics, and practitioners taking it seriously (though I am thrilled to see Delos' WELL Building Standard take root), and much of the insights dispersed among isolated silos.

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The Flourishing Framework is my first attempt to bridge the divides. Below, I've consolidated all I could find in the fields of governance, design, psychology, neuroscience, and epidemiology, among others, to create a departure point for anybody interested in the links between environments and wellbeing. If you're interested in this as well, I'd absolutely love to connect!

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5. Researcher Portal

Lastly, the third leg of the stool: the product that researchers (Vetty employees) use to actually conduct the background checks.

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Product principles:

Speed. Make tasks easily identifiable.
Efficiency. Focus on minimizing redundancy; at high volumes, every redundant action is magnified (even eye movement should be considered).
Memory management. The UI should work to minimize information that the user has to hold in memory.
Power users. Due to training, higher complexity in exchange for higher power is OK.

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This is a basic researcher workflow. Note that it is divided into 3 stages:

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Generally, teams of researchers are assigned to different accounts, with each member taking on a specific phase. Due to Vetty's limited resources, individual researchers take on their own accounts and conduct all 3 phases.

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5.1. Researcher Dashboard

The main focus of the researcher dashboard is the "Adjudication Needed" column, which uses a simple "yes" or "no" to indicate when there is a pending task. Hovering over the cell in the column brings up more detailed information.

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Because researchers are trained users, the dashboard can adopt more complexity for more power. Below, custom components that allow each column to be independently searchable:

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5.2. Candidate Details

Much like the client portal (for account managers), the candidate details are where most of the tasks are done:

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Key items:

The reference panel can be brought up at any time for glanceable information (for example, the researcher may need to compare SSN trace results with national criminal results). The panel eliminates the need to scroll back and forth. Furthermore, it includes a notes section for each candidate, eliminating the "mountain of sticky notes" that researchers previously had to deal with.
All top-level information is easily glanceable in the left navigation panel.

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The researcher portal is now undergoing a major redesign to accommodate larger teams. Stay tuned!

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Conclusion

Whew, that's it! A complete Consumer Reporting Agency platform from scratch. As of this writing, Vetty has experienced a 10x increase in MRR and is now undergoing a serious M&A bid. If you have any questions, or would like to work together, please don't hesitate to reach out at hello@scottliang.com.

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