Keeping watch without getting lost

Tradeverifyd has three big areas: an AI assistant, the supplier maps and a knowledge base. The supplier maps answer “who do I buy from”. The knowledge base answers “what is happening to them right now”: explore any company, monitor the ones you care about, read the alerts, get a regular briefing.

Each of those pages had been built at a different time, by different people, and it showed.

The knowledge base tabs sat in four different positions across four pages. Sometimes on the left, sometimes on the right, sometimes stacked. Every page asked you to find the navigation again. And the main navigation of the product didn’t make the three big areas obvious.

• One navigation for the product. A single bar on top with the three areas: the AI assistant, the supplier maps and the knowledge base.
• One shell for the knowledge base. The same tabs, Explore, Monitored, Briefing and Alerts, always in the same place, on every page.
• Words people use. “Watch list” became “Monitored”. People didn’t get the old term.
• Explore that stays put. Search results open in place, and the search says what it covers.

An alert said something happened, not why it mattered to you. You had to leave the alert to find out which of your companies and supplier maps were affected, and whether to trust the source.

Every alert now answers three questions on the same screen: why it matters to you, what it reaches in your own data (the companies and the supplier maps), and where it comes from, with the list, the record and who published it. Unread alerts carry a dot, every alert a type, and a natural disaster opens with the map of where it hit.

Monitored companies are grouped by the company you care about, with how many of its related companies are being watched and how many alerts are open. Stopping is one click, and a map shows where everything sits. Unticking every country pauses monitoring instead of breaking it, and the card says so.

Nobody was using the old briefing. So the first decision was to hide it instead of polishing it, until it was worth showing.

Then I redesigned it from the job it should do: a regular summary of what changed. The date sits on the left. On the right, one delivery button whose label is the current schedule, opening a small menu with frequency, day, time and email. Download and Regenerate live in the briefing’s own header, and the newest one is marked Latest. Schedules are per person.

I wrote the test for the page, rewrote the product requirements in the team’s template, and opened the work for engineering as an epic with two stories.

• Hide before you fix. A page nobody uses doesn’t need polish first. It needs a reason to exist.
• Same place, every time. Navigation that moves makes every page feel new. Navigation that stays makes the product feel like one.
• Say why before what. An alert that starts with why it matters to you is one people act on.

The knowledge base reads as one place: one bar on top, the same four tabs on every page, alerts that explain themselves, a monitored list you can scan, and a briefing designed around what changed. The briefing went to engineering as a defined epic.