Derisking GRC Technology Investments with Exceptional User Experiences

As a GRC software company founded by practitioners for practitioners, we understand your GRC program needs more than just a workflow automation platform to support your critical business objectives. Even the most technically sophisticated GRC platforms fall short if they don’t also meet your users where they are — even if that means completing risk assessments, on a tablet, offline, in the most remote locations in the world.

The Forrester Wave™: Governance, Risk, And Compliance Platforms, Q4 2023 report, authored by Senior Analyst Cody Scott, summarized the business impact of an effective user experience best:

"Even a risk management product must be derisked for its user. Just because a platform can support requirements doesn’t mean the user can easily configure it to do so. GRC platforms must balance offering integrated data models, advanced workflow, and sophisticated tools across many use cases with providing a sufficient degree of preconfigured applications, content, and best practices to meet users at their respective levels of maturity. Differentiated vendors achieve this balance while providing customers a path forward to scale the platform with minimal friction."

At LogicGate, we’re committed to continuous investment and optimization of the Risk Cloud user experience (UX) for every GRC stakeholder. We built Risk Cloud to enable your team with solutions that are easy to implement, adopt, scale, and mature — without compromising on your GRC program vision. And while we’re proud to be named a Leader in The Forrester Wave™: Governance, Risk, And Compliance Platforms, Q4 2023, which states that our “user experience is second to none,” we’ve only just begun.

Read on to learn why we see LogicGate’s Risk Cloud as a GRC market leader and how we’ll continue to deliver accessible, simple, and scalable GRC solutions for your most complex risk challenges.

Our Commitment to User Experience Excellence

LogicGate’s Product and Technology teams place delivering top-tier user experiences at the forefront of our innovation strategy. Guided by design principles laser-focused on both accessibility and ease of use, these teams follow core tenants like those detailed below to hold ourselves accountable to this commitment from product ideation and design to feature refinement and delivery.

Principle 1: Accessibility Always

“Accessibility always” is the concept that every Risk Cloud release is not only WCAG AA 2.2 compliant, but also inclusive across multiple considerations. Different impairments, word choice, localization requirements, focus needs, and device types all factor into this definition of inclusion. Accessibility is the rising tide of every collaboration tool and GRC platforms are no exception.

Principle 2: Design for Data

Hand in hand with accessibility and inclusion is the promise that regardless of data volume or access to reliable internet, the Risk Cloud user interface must meet every user where they are. This principle’s emphasis on designing for data scalability means that even in the field while using a mobile device, users deserve the right to easily read, understand, input, and submit as little or as much information needed to effectively do their jobs.

Principle 3: Simple and Powerful

Our customers’ risk management programs include dozens of sophisticated processes that ingest and share data across various teams and systems. We know it’s our responsibility to enable program owners to define these powerful actions and relationships to achieve their risk goals, and it’s up to us to make sure all of these components are shared with end users in simple and easy-to-understand ways inside our platform. That’s why we view every complex GRC problem as an opportunity for our team to add value and drive stakeholder engagement through thoughtful and purposeful UX innovation.

Shifting Accessibility Left in the GRC Software Development Cycle

Much like risk management, owning accessibility is a team sport at LogicGate. That’s why LogicGate’s Design team launched the Shift Left initiative in partnership with our Product Management and Development teams. This approach dictates that accessibility must be part of even the earliest stages of the lifecycle development cycle, including initial requirements gathering, low fidelity designs, and acceptance criteria.

We launched this initiative to create accessibility experts across multiple product verticals. No single team carries the responsibility of making the Risk Cloud experience accessible — it's a design and development priority for every new enhancement we release.

Risk Cloud Product Managers ensure keyboard and screen reader requirements are included in all feature specifications. Designers receive checklists to ensure considerations like site navigation, visual contrast, input usage, help text, and many more details are appropriately executed. All mockups and acceptance criteria shared between Designers and Engineers include accessibility annotations. And similarly, Developers are asked to review language for clarity, use consistent patterns, and apply proper markup to keep Risk Cloud accessible — line by line.

Raising the Bar on GRC UX and Accessibility in 2024 and Beyond

LogicGate’s Product and Technology teams will continue to build momentum around accessibility and UX improvements in the year to come. In partnership with Level Access, a leading digital accessibility solutions provider, we’ll conduct a thorough audit of Risk Cloud’s platform accessibility. This process identifies specific opportunities to address gaps or areas for focused remediations and are a recurring engagement in our accessibility accountability routine.

Following this detailed report of where our accessibility compliance stands, we will pursue our Voluntary Product Accessibility Template (VPAT) later this year. This document definitively demonstrates how Risk Cloud meets requirements across Revised 508 Standards, WCAG, and European standards such as EN 301 549.

At an even higher level, our Research team is exploring enhancements to Risk Cloud’s information architecture to make it even easier for you to find, access, and complete your work in a way that better aligns with your individual preferences. This could include navigation updates, improved page layouts, and refined nomenclature that helps create a shared language between your teams. We will continue to collaborate with our knowledgeable customers for insights and feedback as new concepts and designs are explored.

As we continue on our path as a GRC market leader, we’re excited to share new ways to further enable everyone to own their part in risk, foster a productive risk culture, and help customers achieve their business objectives — without limits.