Building trust and reliability to help global finance teams manage their imports
Overview
A slow and page-heavy import operations tool became one clients could trust and self-serve. I led the redesign across all three reconciliation states, partnering with Product & Engineering to reshape how dense regulatory data meets the client. The tool served importers across several markets.
Utilizing the firm’s global treasury platform, corporate importers track and clear unfinished cross-border purchases against a country’s import regulations.
Our customers are companies buying goods from overseas, each required to prove to the regulator that every purchase cleared their country’s import rules. They come to the tool with three jobs:
Upholds legal checks for companies to complete when importing goods from overseas.
Surfaces import and regulatory data directly to the client.
Resolves unsettled imports and regulatory documentation.
The client has paid the supplier abroad and is waiting on proof the goods arrived.
The client's imported goods have cleared customs, but the payment that closes them out is still pending.
The client downloads a certificate confirming the record is settled, and uses it to claim tax credits.
The existing tool was built on a legacy tech stack, reflecting archaic business logic without considering the client’s needs. I held numerous whiteboarding sessions with the Product Executive Director of Global Trade to identify key issues and ideate how we can transform the platform.
Review outstanding aging across the donut charts.
Locate invoices in a paginated grid per entity.
Open each record on a dedicated detail page.
Legacy import management customer journey.
The primary aging view relied on donut charts resulting in a visualization that was always at 100% offering zero insights.
Records were split into a separate paginated grid for every importer entity, each showing only a few fields and a handful of rows at a time. This created friction for clients who wanted to quickly scan their import data.
Clicking through the data grid required the customer navigate to and back an entirely new page.
Before designing in high fidelity, I mapped all three reconciliation states towards one extensible overview page model: summary metrics and two aging-focused charts at the top, a configurable data grid below, and import details in a side drawer.
After creating the blueprint for the UI, I collaborated with our design systems team to utilize our latest approved & tested patterns. At the same time, we were able to successfully push our design system forward and be the first team to introduce expandable record drawers – an incredibly useful pattern for complex payments workflows.
The record drawer allows users to quickly drill into each record while still being able to easily filter and export their data.
I sorted data fields across the main data grid and record drawer, prioritizing the most important columns in the main view.
I designed custom iconography to designate which imports had been paid and had been partially paid.
Our goal was to select the right chart that helps a client best understand which aging imports were close to a penalty.
Clients found it difficult to interpret which imports to resolve first because all the data converges into a single donut.
Bars better reveal the spread across time, ranking the 3-year+ band (the real penalty risk) to the front.
The redesigned experience piloted with seven enterprise importers: a global automotive manufacturer, a multinational tire maker, a major home-appliances brand, and a global networking firm among them. Feedback was positive across all three flows:
Learnings