Keeping up with internal policies while consistently improving on social security practices can be a long process, with many moving parts.
This can be made more challenging if you are administering your compliance and risk management programs manually.
The ideal solution would begin with choosing a compliance management software that can simplify and streamline these processes.
In the compliance and risk management space, there are a growing number of solutions, all exhibiting a wide range of different features.
How do you choose the right information security management system, one that seamlessly meets the business needs of your organisation?
One way to simplify this, is to look out for a GRC solution with a good user experience.
But this begs the question, what does good user experience even mean?
Before we jump ahead, let’s break down the meaning of user experience, and how this can be designed.
User experience design is a varied discipline, where user experience is typically used to describe every interaction that someone has with a product, system or service.
To begin with, user experience design involves gaining an understanding of users, their needs, what they value, their abilities, as well as their limitations.
This knowledge is then combined with the goals of the business.
Over time, both sides can change and evolve, all whilst informing each other.
The goal of user experience design is consistent: to improve the quality of the users’ interactions with a product and related services.
That makes for good UX. But…
The famous UX honeycomb diagram, created by Peter Morville in 2004 illustrates this in a simple way.
This diagram poses that in order for there to be a good user experience, digital information should be:
(Source: semanticstudios.com)
It is important to point out that these facets are not user goals – such as usable, useful, findable and accessible, for example.
Whilst they facilitate usability and convenience, they still require an ultimate goal to guide the full user experience.
Defining that user goal is entirely dependent on the business, the context, and most importantly, the user.
Take Facebook and Twitter, for instance.
Both allow users to make posts expressing themselves, but the user experience is widely different.
That is because there are different user goals: both are made for different audiences (with different audiences themselves), both with different goals in mind.
As you can see, the goal of the experience guides the meaning of usability.
Now, imagine a compliance management solution that can streamline how you manage your documentation, centralise how you keep up with your internal policies and facilitate how your organisation implements and maintains a culture of compliance.
These are all means to different ends: achieving or maintaining ISO certification, passing an internal audit, or simply implementing and managing compliance.
So whilst user goals can slightly differ based on context, most businesses will have different goals when searching for a GRC solution.
Knowing the user goals within the context of the business, combined with an understanding of the honeycomb facets, can be a way to judge whether the user experience of a product is right for your organisation.
So, now you know that the users, the context of the software and the needs of the business drive the goal of the user experience.
Therefore, given that we’re within the GRC space, if the context of the software is to facilitate managing documentation, keeping up with internal policies and implementing a culture of compliance, it can also be assumed that the user goals and needs of the business are to ultimately, achieve or maintain ISO certification.
But just imagine your compliance management platform does not let you assign people to certain documents.
Or, imagine you cannot use the search function effectively, leaving you unable to find the policies you’re looking for.
If your compliance team cannot collaborate effectively through your GRC solution, or the auditor cannot read through your policies and guidelines, it can be a costly experience.
Beyond that, wasted efforts, time and frustration can add unnecessary stress to managing compliance.
Bad UX can result in:
Documentation left unread, outdated and forgotten
Users moving on to other platforms
Disengaged users, resulting in less efficiency and productivity
At Inverifi, we understand how important user experience is, particularly when it comes to something as complex as managing compliance.
Therefore, we place special attention on the following aspects of the user experience:
First impressions are everything, so we’ve taken special attention to the very first steps taken inside Inverifi. Our in-product onboarding takes on a proactive help form to explain the value of our key features, whilst our quickstart guides you by explaining which tasks to do first, in order to familiarise with the product.
We follow the “Recognition over recall” usability heuristic when creating the navigation. This heuristic, or rule of thumb, states that people find it easy to recognise information, rather than trying to remember it. Based on this, we made our key areas of the product fully visible, so you do not have to constantly remember where your policies and procedures are.
There is nothing quite as powerful as familiarity, and science backs this up. We follow on from the mere-exposure effect (Zajonc, 2001), which states that people prefer things that are familiar to them. This is because familiar experiences do not involve many cognitive resources, such as thinking or learning. We keep the user experience familiar within the product, with the goal of helping facilitate how quickly you learn and familiarise yourself with the product’s usage patterns.
We know you might have a vast amount of policies to manage. We’ve made it so that you can assign different roles to different people, as well as change the visibility settings of your documentation. In turn, this also changes what others see and have access to. The goal here is to create predictable and credible interactions, which in turn can create more trust in the product and the brand.
Visibility is key to managing compliance effectively. Being able to see which policies are assigned to who, how many there are, when they are due to be reviewed, are just a few examples of functionality you can find in Inverifi. So when it comes to visibility, Inverifi allows you to fulfil your tasks without effort, giving you full visibility of all the information you need.
At Inverifi, we are passionate about global accessibility standards such as WCAG, following those closely to ensure we don’t leave anyone out of an ever-evolving digital world.
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If you’d like to chat about your organisation’s compliance needs or book a demo – we’re here to help.
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