Global law & professional services
A risk index that had to be readable in about four seconds.
FIRST is Fragomen's Immigration Risk & Stability Tracker — a scored view of immigration and mobility risk across the world, built for the people who decide where a company can safely move its staff. Small product. Very little room to hide.
Role
Product designer — end to end
Own
IA, interaction, visual design, data visualisation, front-end handoff
Shape
Public marketing surface plus a subscriber product
01 · The BRIEF
Turn a research methodology into something you can glance at.
Behind FIRST sits a real scoring methodology — a lot of assessment work, per country, refreshed over time. The output of all that is one number between 0 and 100.
The people who need that number are not analysts. They are mobility leads and HR teams with a specific, urgent question: can we move people into this country next quarter, and what has changed since we last checked? They will give the product about four seconds before deciding whether it is useful.
So the whole design problem is compression. Get from a world view to a defensible answer about one country in as few moves as possible, without making the number look more certain than it is.
02 · Entry
The landing page has one job: say what the number means.
Public entry. Two doors: get started, or go read how the score is built.
03 · The map
Two ways to read the data, side by side, always.
The map answers where is it bad. The list answers what exactly is the number, and which way is it moving. Neither one alone is enough, and making them separate views would have cost a click on the single most common comparison in the product.
So they sit permanently side by side and stay in sync. Hovering a country highlights its row, selecting a row moves the map. The list carries the delta arrow — up four, down twelve — because in this product the direction of travel matters more than the absolute score.
The scale is five bands rather than a continuous gradient. Continuous looks more precise and is harder to read. Bands match how the methodology actually classifies risk, and they survive being looked at on a laptop in a meeting.
04 · The country
The score, then immediately the reason for it.
A country opens over the map rather than replacing it, so you keep your place while comparing.
The layout is deliberate about order. Score and its movement sit top right where the eye lands. The written summary sits left, because it is what a person will actually paste into an email. The trend line sits under the score, because a single number with no history is the thing that gets a user in trouble. Related alerts and insights sit last — they are the next action, not the answer.
The one thing I pushed hardest on: the summary is prose, not bullets. These teams have to explain the situation to someone else. Bullets make you rewrite it. Paragraphs let you copy it.
04 · The country
The score, then immediately the reason for it.
A country opens over the map rather than replacing it, so you keep your place while comparing.
The layout is deliberate about order. Score and its movement sit top right where the eye lands. The written summary sits left, because it is what a person will actually paste into an email. The trend line sits under the score, because a single number with no history is the thing that gets a user in trouble. Related alerts and insights sit last — they are the next action, not the answer.
The one thing I pushed hardest on: the summary is prose, not bullets. These teams have to explain the situation to someone else. Bullets make you rewrite it. Paragraphs let you copy it.
06 · What was hard
Three small problems that took most of the time.
Proposes
Colour that means something
Green to red on a risk map is a cliché for a good reason, but it also fails for a chunk of users. The bands carry a numeric label everywhere they appear, and the list repeats the score as a number, so colour is reinforcement rather than the only signal.
Commits
Commits
A score that ages
The number is a snapshot of a methodology run, not a live feed. The trend line and the movement indicator exist so nobody reads a stale score as today's truth.
OUTCOME
Shipped and live, as the public face of a research product Fragomen sells to enterprise clients.
A methodology that previously travelled as documents now travels as a product people can open, filter and cite.
Subscription and alerting built in, which turns a one-off reference into something with a reason to return.
Afterwards
What I would change.
The country list can show the same country more than once when regional grouping and filtering interact — visible in the screenshots above, and exactly the kind of thing that erodes trust in a data product faster than any visual flaw.
I would also want comparison. Right now you read countries one at a time, but the real question is almost always relative: is this worse than the place we already operate in? That is the next version.
I am including both because a case study where everything went well is not a case study.
More
Happy to walk through any of this properly.
This one is small and shipped, which makes it easy to talk about honestly.
Ask me about the parts that are not on the page.