Case study · OneTrust
SpeakUp: Investigation Workspace
Ethics investigators handle some of the most sensitive cases a company sees: whistleblowing, harassment, retaliation. The tools they used to run those cases were fragmented across systems.
The situation on arrival
Until the Customer Advisory Board demo, the constraint the whole design had to fit inside.
Systems that showed how a case connected to other cases, people, or evidence.
Ethics cases disappeared into a black hole for weeks: no visibility into what had been done, what was scheduled, or what still needed attention. The work happened off-tool, interviews in Outlook and notes in Word, and case relationships that mattered were buried in separate records instead of visible where an investigator needed them.
I have to leave the tool to schedule interviews in Outlook, take notes in Word, and manually check back for updates. It's impossible to see what's been done.
What was stated
Our Director of Ethics & Compliance and Director of Product Management brought me in ahead of a Customer Advisory Board session during Trust Week. The ask was scoped narrowly from the outset: a handful of screens, concept-level only, meant to test a direction with customers, not a production build and not a ground-up rebuild.
What was actually true
The real work wasn't producing polish under a deadline. It was figuring out, in real time with the Ethics & Compliance Director, what needed to be fully resolved to test with customers and what only needed to hold up in conversation.
One field was cut outright mid-session once it was clear it didn't add value beyond a basic yes/no attribute. A later screen was deliberately left conceptual, a fallback to speak to only if time allowed. That judgment, knowing which parts of the system needed to be real and which just needed to be legible, was the actual design problem inside the three-week window, more than any single interaction pattern.
What changed
The current state didn't allow investigators to compare case information side by side while drilling into a related profile: seeing a person's history meant losing the case you were already working from. I designed a right-side flyout panel instead of a dedicated page specifically to solve that. Clicking into a related case number surfaces a profile without navigating away, while filterable supporting information (case IDs, involved parties, roles, substantiation outcomes) stays available in the same view. I validated that direction internally with my experience design team in a design review before moving forward with it, rather than defaulting to it on deadline pressure alone.
The Investigation Workspace unifies interview scheduling, evidence management, and status visibility in one view, with proposed Outlook and Word integrations to eliminate the admin friction of jumping between systems to do the actual work of a case.
The pattern underneath both is progressive disclosure: investigators get context exactly when they need it, not all of it at once. The system reveals complexity gradually, matching how an investigator actually works through a case rather than forcing them to hold the whole system in their head.
From problem to a validated concept, shown at the Customer Advisory Board demo.
The progressive disclosure pattern was adopted across every SpeakUp module, not just this one.
Outlook and Word integrations approved to carry the friction fix further.
The wireframes
Concept mockups exploring a future state, built after reviewing the current-state product, not the live product itself.
The starting point. A case detail view where every involved party's role, outcome, and sanctions live in one place, but where their history with other cases is still invisible.
Substantiation in view. Scrolled further right, substantiation outcomes sit alongside stage and role, so a pattern of prior substantiated findings is visible at a glance instead of buried in separate case files.
Filtering to the pattern that matters. An investigator working a harassment case can narrow the related-cases list to just the issue type that matters, instead of scanning every type at once.
Where it stopped
The Customer Advisory Board validated the Related Cases panel as solving investigators' number one pain point. Hitting that in three weeks meant constant, explicit tradeoffs about what needed to be fully resolved versus conceptually gestured at: not because the deadline made the work easy, but because a clear read on which was which kept the team from stalling on the wrong details.
The progressive disclosure pattern outlived this one panel. It's now the pattern the rest of SpeakUp is built on, and the proposed Outlook and Word integrations carried the friction-reduction work forward into the Q3 roadmap.