Redesigning Lifted’s Immigration Compliance platform
Overhauled Lifted’s compliance UX using progressive disclosure, eliminating manual operations work, boosting user engagement, and driving £140k in new revenue within three months.
Introduction
In the UK, care providers employing sponsored non-UK workers face strict compliance oversight from UK Visas and Immigration (UKVI), a division of the Home Office.
Unannounced audits and missed compliance records can result in civil penalties of up to £60,000 per worker and the revocation of their sponsor licence — threatening severe operational collapse.
Lifted is a SaaS platform that centralises workforce compliance, automates Right-to-Work tracking, and ensures care providers remain continuously audit-ready.
Challenge
Lifted’s Immigration Compliance feature was failing to communicate critical compliance risks effectively. The interface overwhelmed care providers, prompting our internal operations team to manually run audits off-platform in spreadsheets and documents to deliver clearer insights. This was eroding the value of our SaaS platform, and creating a large operational bottleneck.
Insight
By mapping the operations team’s manual workarounds, I uncovered a vital insight: the platform was not suffering from a data deficit, but a presentation deficit. All the required compliance information was already captured in the backend, yet the user interface failed to communicate it clearly to care providers. The off-platform reports succeeded because they offered a digestible format that users could easily follow.
Solution
Through direct customer conversations, I identified that solving the issue required implementing progressive disclosure to prevent cognitive overload and embedding better education directly into the workflow so providers could understand and resolve compliance issues with confidence.
As part of a two-week sprint, I designed, built and shipped Lifted’s new Immigration Compliance feature and spent the following weeks monitoring engagement, gathering feedback, and iterating on the implementation.
Executive summary
The previous iteration buried critical insights under granular data. Through user research, I identified two distinct primary personas: hands-on HR managers and high-level managing directors or regional leaders. To serve both without friction, I designed an executive summary that highlights top-level compliance health at a glance, giving decision-makers immediate clarity on organisational risk before diving into the details.
Progressive disclosure
Customer research and internal audit workarounds revealed that cognitive overload was the primary reason users struggled with the original interface. The redesign restructured the information architecture using progressive disclosure, guiding users seamlessly from high-level status overviews into actionable detail. This allowed care managers to investigate specific risk factors and resolve compliance issues without feeling overwhelmed by complex datasets.
Proactive reporting
Care providers face strict statutory requirements to report changes of circumstances to UKVI within 10 working days, yet the platform offered no contextual guidance on what triggered a reportable event. The redesign introduced embedded education and proactive reporting workflows that directly inform providers on why, how, and when to report changes, replacing guesswork with confident compliance management.
Impact
Following the launch, care provider feedback was overwhelmingly positive, marked by a significant increase in daily platform engagement and the complete retirement of manual audit workarounds. Beyond streamlining internal operations, the upgraded feature provided our sales team with a compelling selling point, driving a £140k revenue increase over the next three months.
Learnings
This project highlighted the importance of observing internal workarounds as primary user research. When internal teams resort to manual processes, it is rarely a missing feature issue, but rather an indicator that the platform is failing to present existing data clearly.