ESG Assessment

Challenge

Before this platform, teams ran assessments through Excel and email. Data lived across multiple sheets and local copies, leading to repetitive entry, version conflicts, and time lost to verification. Without integrations, updates were hard to import and insights went stale—impacting analysis quality, reporting, and client deliverables. Visibility was limited: project leads couldn’t easily track progress, assign work, or reference historical decisions. As demand for ESG services accelerated, these fragmented processes made it difficult to scale, measure outcomes, and maintain accountability.

Opportunity

We saw a chance to move from documents and inboxes to a single source of truth: a web platform that facilitates the assessment process, supports parallel work, and preserves context from first interview to final report. The objectives were clear: centralize data and assignments, enable role-based collaboration, integrate industry frameworks while allowing customization, and create a living audit trail that improves quality and speeds delivery—without over-engineering.

Solution

Architecture
A repeatable framework unifies two cores—an Issues Workspace and a Reporting system—as well as a fixed right-hand global panel for supporting actions. This creates a single source of truth for ongoing work and monitoring across roles, supports real-time collaboration, and keeps contextual resources easily accessible for deep work while maintaining an export-ready, scannable display with richer insights for client deliverables.

Issues Workspace
I co-designed an overlay to import issues from selected ESG frameworks and add custom issues as needed, producing a tailored issue set per client engagement. With a primary focus on issue cards and how to best surface relevance, importance, and status, with quick links to related actions and artifacts. Ensuring directly editable patterns keep active vs. read-only states subtle and consistent.

Issue-first vs. Research-first
Usability testing showed subject matter experts often discover multiple issues while researching. Our initial issue-first model reflected the relationships: issue ↔ analysis = 1:1 and issue ↔ research = 1:many, yet lacked a process for research to be mapped to multiple issues. We introduced a global research panel in the right panel to create, govern, and connect entries across issues, with role-based controls to delete or detach. Each issue and research entry is a single source in the panel, minimizing duplicate work and improving visibility. Users can toggle quickly between issue and research views to stay in flow.

Reporting
The Reporting system visualizes key evaluation data from issues and links directly to issue panels to prevent static or recreated information and reduce maintenance. Research is displayed in real-time, report-ready outputs—showcasing interactive, prioritized issue sets and executive summaries.

Interaction & IA principles
Moving from static Excel to a cloud platform, we emphasized clear relationships and meaningful context to establish uniformity to improve performance. Modular, flexible, and reusable patterns reduce redundancy, prevent inconsistent data, and form a scalable foundation for expanding ESG services.

Visual and Interactive Systems
To support executives, managers, and individual contributors, we designed view-oriented, action-ready patterns with clear usage cues. Working across neighboring apps in the ecosystem, my co-designer and I extended the design system for consistency while introducing context-specific, reusable components that scale across products.

Reflection

My first ESG product became a bridge to adjacent initiatives—including Climate Risk—because we translated a complex, data-heavy, labor-intensive process into a collaborative, streamlined, lightweight product. Leading to stronger data integrity, faster delivery, and higher confidence in outcomes, giving the client a reliable foundation to grow ESG services. By building and governing the core design system, I was also able to enable my co-designer to work autonomously, and strengthen my personal development—increasing momentum that carried into more advanced work and responsibility.