Designing an industry leading KYB product

The challenge

My challenge was to redesign our entire KYB case management solution with a focus on introducing a design language, a new cohesive interface and improving the overall user experience of the platform.

When I first joined Detected, there was already a live KYB dashboard in place. Before making any changes, I focused on understanding the landscape by auditing the existing UI, understanding the industry, and speaking with our product owner to uncover user goals and pain points. Only then could I begin to strategically reshape the product.

One of the key challenges in designing a KYB product is finding the right balance between clarity, depth, and efficiency. These products are used by task-orientated power users making high-stakes decisions and the interface needs to support that. Our existing product lacked this balance as it favoured visual appeal over designing for real user problems.

I also had to shift the design and team’s approach toward a more customer-focused, problem-solving mentality, moving away from designing for visual appeal. Visual design does play a role, however, it should not come at the expense of usability.

For a KYB product to be truly effective, it needs to surface the right information at the right moment, minimise cognitive load, and provide a structure that reflects how compliance professionals actually work. That means clear hierarchy, quick access to key actions, and layouts built for scanning and comparison. Good design isn’t about decoration, it’s about enabling confident, informed decisions. I therefore had to consider various design principles, such as progressive disclosure and clarity over aesthetics, to ensure we could reshape our product to become industry leading.

My approach

The process began with a comprehensive audit of the existing product. I reviewed the interface end-to-end to identify usability issues, inconsistencies, and areas where the design wasn’t effectively supporting user needs. This helped establish a clear baseline and set the direction for improvement.

From there, I partnered closely with our product owner and spoke directly with external users to better understand how compliance teams worked — their goals, pain points, and the gaps in the current experience. With a clearer view of both the challenges and opportunities, I began designing a library of reusable UI components and interaction patterns that could be applied consistently across the product.

Together with the product owner, we also mapped out a list of improvements we could tackle incrementally, while aligning on larger, strategic updates with the CTO. This approach allowed us to deliver meaningful enhancements in the short term while planning for more substantial changes in parallel.

Specifically, the redesign focused on rebuilding the layout, typography, and visual hierarchy. Every decision was rooted in real user behaviour and validated assumptions, and it focused on creating a high-density interface specially suited to task-orientated power users. I introduced a more suitable typeface, restructured the sidebar navigation, and clarified dense data layouts to improve scannability and efficiency.

As part of the visual overhaul, I also expanded the product’s colour palette to introduce a more refined, functional aesthetic. One deliberate choice was the introduction of a soft blue-grey tone to replace much of the flat grey used previously. While flat greys are often used to create a neutral or minimalistic UI, they can unintentionally introduce visual ambiguity — especially in dense interfaces. Grey lacks strong hue association, which means in data-heavy products, this can cause elements to blend together, making it harder for users to orient themselves or spot actionable areas quickly. In contrast, a carefully chosen blue-grey provides a subtle hue bias that supports cognitive grouping. Blue-greys carry just enough chromatic value to guide the eye and create separation between layers of content, while still feeling neutral and unobtrusive.

The integration and deployment of the new design had to be carefully planned to ensure no breaking changes were made. I analysed all page segments, their connection and dependancy to other areas and created a risk plan for their deployment. Once I understood which new design elements could be introduced that had the most reduced risk and least dependancy, we created a specific epic for their release. Over time, this approach was followed until all new design changes were released.

In addition to the product design overhaul, I created a centralised design area in Notion that documented user personas, design principles, visual patterns, tone of voice guidelines, and system documentation. This is essential as it ensures all products maintain a recognised voice (including our onboarding and verification products), design patterns and interface elements maintain operative behaviour and visual consistency, and additional user interface layers such as error handling and accessibility rules are clearly defined. The team also benefits from the design language as they are equipped with a library of rules and patterns which increases development efficiency whilst maintaining product consistency.

This design language has now became the single source of truth for our entire product design approach.

Outcome

The redesign is now largely complete, and the product has evolved into an experience that feels much more aligned with the people who use it every day. Compliance analysts now have a tool that’s clearer, more structured, and easier to navigate which helps them move through their tasks with greater confidence and less friction.

While no product is ever truly finished, the foundations we've put in place mean future improvements can build on a strong, user-centred system. The introduction of a centralised design system has implemented much-needed consistency across the interface, reducing cognitive load and shortening the learning curve for both new and existing users.

Ultimately, the product now better reflects the needs of its audience: trust-driven professionals who rely on speed, clarity, and control. And by grounding our design approach in real-world behaviour and scalable design principles, we’ve set the stage for long-term product growth.