Certn Centric — Rebuilding a Global Background Check Platform

Certn • 2024–Present

Designing a scalable, self-serve platform across regions, use cases, and regulatory constraints.

Timeline: 2024–Present
Scope: End-to-end platform
My Role: Senior → Lead Product Designer

Impact

Launched MVP in a few months (4 checks → scaled to 74 (500+ if you include country variants)
Scaled platform to support a growing set of checks and clients
Enabled self-serve ordering for Property Management clients
Established foundational patterns for scaling across use cases

Context

Certn is a background screening platform that enables businesses to run checks—such as criminal records, credit reports, and identity verification—on applicants for purposes like employment or tenancy.

The legacy Certn platform was not built to scale with the company’s growth. It was slow, not fully accessible, and structured around specific use cases. Different permissible purposes (e.g., employment vs tenancy) were separated into entirely different portals, which simplified the experience but created fragmentation and limited flexibility.

At the same time, Certn was expanding into new markets such as the UK and APAC, introducing additional complexity around regulation, data storage, and what types of checks could be offered in different regions.

Continuing to evolve the existing system while it remained in use was not feasible. We needed a new platform that could support a global, self-serve experience across multiple use cases, regions, and check types.

Certn Centric was built to serve as that foundation.

Research – Understanding painpoints

Research

Wireframes

Early stage wireframe concepts of Client Portal

Research – Understanding painpoints

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My Role & Scope

At the start of the project, both the Director and Manager of UX had left the company. As a senior designer, I stepped into a broader role, working directly with Product and Engineering leadership to define the MVP and shape the platform direction.

I was responsible for:

Designing the end-to-end client portal experience
Defining and evolving scalable UX patterns across checks
Creating high-fidelity prototypes to support development
Expanding the design system to support new product needs
Providing guidance across adjacent systems, including Case Management
I worked closely with Product and Engineering to balance speed, system integrity, and evolving requirements, while also supporting other designers to ensure consistency across the broader platform.

I worked closely with Product and Engineering to balance speed, system integrity, and evolving requirements, while also supporting other designers to ensure consistency across the broader platform.

Key Challenges

Designing a platform while shipping an MVP

We needed to move quickly to launch, while also laying the foundation for something that could scale long-term.

Legal and compliance constraints

Permissible purpose (employment vs tenancy) affects:

Which checks are available
What credentialing is required
What data can be shown in reports

Fragmented legacy model

Previous systems were separated by use case. Moving to a unified platform introduced new complexity in how these differences were handled.

Scaling complexity

Each check had unique requirements, increasing the risk of inconsistent patterns and one-off solutions.

Engineering constraints

The system used to configure checks (including JSON-driven forms) was complex. Changes were not always straightforward, and implementation cost influenced what could be improved.

Key Decisions

Unifying Experiences Across Permissible Purposes

Context: Legacy Certn separated different permissible purposes into distinct portals, simplifying UX but limiting scalability.

Tradeoff: Maintain separate, simpler experiences vs. Unify into a single, scalable platform.

Decision: I advocated for unifying experiences into a single platform, using dynamic logic to adjust available checks, requirements, and outputs based on permissible purpose.

Impact: This increased UX complexity through conditional flows and additional inputs, but enabled a scalable foundation across use cases, regions, and future expansion.

Defining Scalable Patterns Across Checks

Problem: Each check introduced unique requirements, increasing the risk of fragmentation as the platform scaled and more distributed teams built checks.

Approach: I defined shared patterns for ordering, data input structures, fulfillment tasks, consumer reports (PDF and responsive web). These patterns were reinforced through the design system and reused across checks.

Tradeoff: More upfront alignment vs faster scaling and consistency later.

Impact: Reduced duplication and created a more cohesive experience as new checks were introduced.

Prioritizing Expansion Over Structural Refinement

Reality: As more checks were added, limitations in the ordering experience became more apparent. While new designs were created to address these issues, implementation costs were often high due to system complexity.

Decision: I worked with Product and Engineering to prioritize continued expansion—adding new checks and supporting business growth—while deferring some structural UX improvements.

Impact: Enabled rapid scaling and delivery against targets, but required extending patterns beyond their original intent, introducing areas for future improvement.

Designing Across the Full Lifecycle

Scope Expansion: The experience extended beyond the client portal to include:

Ordering
Applicant experience
Fulfillment (Case Management)
Reporting

Approach: I provided guidance across adjacent systems to ensure alignment in data, structure, and experience.

Impact: Improved system coherence and reduced downstream friction caused by disconnected decisions.

Key Learnings

Systems emerge through shipping, not upfront design. Legal and technical constraints shape the experience as much as any design decision, and scaling exposes weaknesses that simply aren't visible early on — often when there's little runway to address them cleanly.

Systems don't break down when they're wrong; they break down when they're extended beyond their original assumptions. As we rapidly scaled checks and introduced contributions from multiple teams, gaps in early patterns became apparent. What worked for a smaller, focused set of use cases didn't hold as we expanded across purposes, regions, and legacy expectations.

Introducing Core (EMEA) checks into a more generalized global system added further complexity — particularly when existing clients expected continuity with how those checks had previously functioned. Designing more flexible, reusable patterns, including more neutral purpose-agnostic copy, became necessary to support that scale.

Scalability also meant coordinating across systems, not just adding to them. As the number and combinations of checks grew, we had to ensure applicants weren't asked for the same information multiple times. Consolidating shared data collection across checks proved significantly more complex than designing individual flows — it required thinking about how multiple systems interact rather than optimizing any single experience.

The platform continues to evolve as we expand into new markets and capabilities. The foundation is significantly stronger than what existed before — but like most platforms operating at this scale, it's still being shaped by the same forces that built it.