In the above screenshot, the DSP has technically earned a passing grade of 92.1%, but if the areas highlighted in yellow and (especially) red are not corrected before the next audit round, the DSP's business could be penalized. Each of these areas of improvement are document-related. Another concern was the use of only color to identify what needs attention. For a colorblind user, these important aspects of the audit report are virtually invisible without reading it in its entirety.

Also in the case above (and in most, as our research suggested), the I-9 forms for this DSP's drivers were incomplete. Using E-Verify to onboard these drivers could have flagged the incomplete sections beforehand, but its use is not required in the state of Massachussetts, where this DSP operates. Nuances like these may seem small, but were quite common flags during compliance audits.

In the design below, widgets for an existing safety dashboard and scorecard were referenced for the compliance data points, however all colored text and data bars had to be darkened to pass accessibility color contrast standards. Arrow icons denote changes in points within tables so that important information doesn't rely on color alone to be conveyed.

Our interviewed DSPs overwhelmingly cited Amazon's lack of transparency during audit season as their reasoning for this specific design request. In short, they wanted an online portal where they could log in and proactively check their compliance status whenever they wanted. Importantly, this potential solution could send tailored automatic notifications, reducing the need to send one-off emails to auditors just to anxiously await a sometimes inadequate response. On Amazon's side, an audit wizard with a robust CMS could digitally walk a DSP through the entire auditing process, with necessary updates to guidelines and local laws ready to be pushed at will.

Along the transparency theme, the other main pain point was Amazon's lack of proactive training materials on how to pass a compliance audit with a healthy 90+ score. For some DSPs, they didn't even know about routine compliance checks until they received their first audit request email. DSPs had other ideas such as tracking driver's license expiration dates, tracking scheduled breaks taken and reported by drivers, and even the ability to request a mock audit to keep them on top of their game. DSPs like being proactive.

Since auditing is such a regular, yet complex process (and I was designing this around tax season), we wanted to test an 'audit wizard' experience with DSPs. Comparing this concept to Intuit TurboTax made for an easy design initiative to explain and get stakeholder buy-in for. This was leveraged in the following designs to pull out parts of the overall document submission process into digestable steps.

The DSP would start by clicking "Begin audit submission."

When testing these designs with DSPs, they always chose the longer route of submitting data with Amazon's guidance, regardless of how many audits they'd passed previously.

Since I-9 forms were the most common flag that tripped up DSPs, I designed the workflow to offer relevant form guidance while focusing on taking advantage of Amazon's machine learning tech to scan documents for errors. It was well-received by DSPs to stress the importance of streamlining and automating as much of the audit experience as possible.