BeenVerified User Workflow & Data Discovery
As the design lead, I spearheaded the redesign of critical user workflows and data discovery pathways within the BeenVerified platform. This work aimed to reduce friction, improve information access, and increase user engagement. Through research, prototyping, and iterative design, we delivered a more intuitive experience that empowered users to efficiently surface and act on critical data.
Users frequently faced friction when accessing data-rich reports, leading to inefficiencies and missed opportunities to uncover key insights. This resulted in user frustration and limited engagement with the platform’s full capabilities. Our goal was to streamline workflows and surface relevant information faster, ultimately driving user retention and increasing the perceived value of the platform.
By streamlining the experience across non-report functionalities, such as searching, sorting, saving and surfacing new information will reduce user friction, increase product stickiness and a higher retention rate
Understanding the user's journey suing BeenVerified and how they are interacting with and reacting to information is essential to improving it. Collaborating with product and research teams, I conducted user interviews and synthesized key themes, uncovering critical pain points around information overload and disjointed workflows. These insights directly informed our feature prioritization and design approach.
Interviewing users to learn more
Themes
- Users are missing internal navigation
- Users are asking for a place to curate and save lists of information
- Users are missing updates about information which makes them less likely to return
- Users don’t always understand there are multiple search types
- Non cohesive footers are distracting and disruptive
- Users want a way to make notes on reports for when they return at a later time
To enhance navigation and address user challenges, We introduced a sidebar navigation and modernized the report interface to simplify access to key data. Usability testing confirmed that these changes reduced user confusion and improved task efficiency, validating our design direction before development. This change improved the discoverability of key features, reducing user confusion and streamlining access to important tools.
The footer was restructured into a column-based layout, informed by user feedback, to include valuable resources such as social media links and a QR code for seamless mobile app downloads. These updates not only improved usability but also increased user engagement with additional platform features.
We introduced a notification system to keep users regularly informed of relevant updates, searches, and new features. This enhancement was driven by user feedback from interviews, where we discovered that users often missed updates to reports they were monitoring or new feature releases.
A major theme that emerged from user interviews was that users were leaving the platform to use external software for organizing lists, such as for class reunions, sales prospects, or potential leads. They would copy URLs from BeenVerified and paste them into word documents to keep track. To address this, we introduced a list functionality that allows users to organize reports into customizable groupings, keeping them within the platform while better supporting their workflow.
.png)
It was revealed that users often exited BeenVerified to document interesting findings in external applications, such as word documents or email, which proved cumbersome and difficult to manage. To address this, we designed a feature allowing users to add annotations directly to reports. These notes are then consolidated on a dedicated "Notes" page, giving users a clear overview of their annotations and which reports they've documented, streamlining their workflow.
Before rolling out these optimizations to all users, we conducted an A/B test with 5% of BeenVerified's total traffic. In this test, the "A" variation included all the updates described above, while the control group experienced the site as it was previously. This allowed us to measure the impact of the changes and ensure they delivered a meaningful improvement.
Quantifying the results with A/B testing
Increase user retention
Feature usage
Overall interactions
By leveraging user-reported data and optimizing information discovery, management, saving, and search processes, we achieved significant results:
• $1.5 million increase in annual revenue,
• 26% rise in non-report feature usage
• 27% boost in overall user interactions.
