Content Design with Checkr

Checkr’s mission to make hiring fairer for people with criminal records is commendable. Their content needed some work.

They’d come quite a ways with their service and product experience with a team of designers, product managers, and engineers, but were noticing user comprehension, drop off, and engagement levels weren’t where they wanted them to be. Through helping them create a product writing style guide, hiring a manager for the team and a few writers, plus getting into the weeds and writing app flows, transactional emails, and more myself, we were able to boost key metrics as well as educate the broader public on their admirable mission.

Here’s one of the projects we shipped together:

Challenge

User research surveys as well as click-through rates indicated that the content guiding job applicants to complete their background checks wasn’t doing its job.

Process

I gathered information from Checkr’s User Research, Design, and Legal teams to learn why the content and design was the way it was, what was working and what wasn’t, and what could and couldn’t be changed in this highly regulated space.

One of the top issues we were finding was with trust. Many people didn’t understand who this email was from, or why they should trust a random company asking them to give up sensitive information.

I then got to work with lead designer Melanie Cernak to propose, design, and write an updated 22-email flow to guide users more effectively, clearly, and with more personality, through the process.

Results

The user research team reported an increase in user-reported trust in the Checkr brand, and the data science team reported these results (take a look at the before and after introductory email below):