ESG Playbook
Environmental, Social, and Corporate Governance (ESG) refers to the three central factors in measuring the sustainability and societal impact of an investment in a company or business. These criteria help to better determine the future financial performance of companies (return and risk).
ESG Playbook is a holistic simple approach to sustainability reporting.
ESG Playbook is a SASB & TCFD licensed specialist.
ESG Playbook has the strategic know-how to simplify the challenging and complex world of sustainability reporting.
The Brief
I was tasked with creating a suite of applications for ESG sustainability reporting that is simple, user friendly, and operationally efficient in sharing information cross-platform (with other users and between applications ) in a digital ecosystem that has the elasticity to grow within this burgeoning field.
MY ROLE:
Product Designer.
Information Architecture, User Interface Design, Atomic design, Copywriting, Midfi wireframes, High Fidelity Wireframes & Prototype
The Team: Henry Thomas McNally DAN Cleary dalton pierce
My Role: PRODUCT DESIGNER. Information Architecture, User Interface Design, Atomic design, Copywriting, Midfi wireframes, High Fidelity Wireframes & Prototype
Digital Ecosystem
The ESG Playbook streamlines reporting by sharing information across applications .
User Research
Our research began with a deep dive into ESG Sustainability reporting thoroughly researching each of the 3 pillars Environmental, Social and Governance.
To meet stakeholders’ growing need for information, companies are increasingly disclosing these non-financial key performance indicators (KPIs) that help companies go beyond traditional financial reporting to deliver a more holistic view of corporate performance. The European Federation of Financial Analysts Socities (EFFAS) report provides an exhaustive list of KPIs for ESG.
Due to the sensitive nature of sustainability reporting interviews were hard to come by, we then pivoted and hired a Sustainability Consultant. The expertise and insights into the painpoints and opportunities to streamline the reporting process garnered from the consultant were immensely helpful in the R&D process.
Painpoints/Insights
When completing a report the use of several different applications is necesarry and extremely time consuming.
SustAINABILITY OFFICERS NEED to integrate all the information received to CREATE A Cohesive ESG report.
pertinent Information needs to inform all aspects of the ESG report.
Keep the Report rooted in one framework and add another sysytem to it (if using more than one framework).
Give Users the option to Export Documents as CSV, DOC, PDF, XLS files
Exploring The Problem Space
Through our extensive research the 4 components in reporting that I prioritized are:
Materiality Matrices
Carbon Emissions Calculation
SASB, GRI, or TCFD Reports
Risk Assessment Reports
Design
We chose the SASB ESG frameworks to root the product due to their expansive topics and their frequently updated sustainability and regulatory information. To add flexibility I designed it to allow users to add KPIs from other frameworks and create custom KPIs.
I saw the opportunity to create a suite of products that converged on all necessary components in creating an ESG Sustainability Report. ESG Playbook also needed the elasticity for users to incorporate individual applications into their reporting system.
The ESG Playbook Suite :
Materiality Matrix Builder
TOOL TO Build a materiality matrix to help visualize the findings of materiality assessmentS, INDICATING what's important for reporting and what's important for strategy
Carbon Emissions Calculator
The calculator estimates a firms carbon footprint in three areas: energy, transportation and waste.
SASB Report Template Builder
CREATE A Report TEMPLATE USING THE SASB standards to identify and manage financially-material sustainability issues and communicate these issues to investorS.
Risk Assesment Comparison Tool
Uncover, Analyze and Visualize Business Risks to Protect Your Organization. Identify and Help Prevent & Mitigate Risks.
Dashboard 1.0: The initial dashboard we were going to include the Emissions Calculator with the Materiality Assessment tool . As the design process continued and through feedback from our sustainability reporting consultant we realized the complexity of creating the reports and we need to use our screen space more efficiently. Users needed more information and would be better served by focusing at one report at a Time.
Dashboard 2.0: I included links to educational materials, links to the other Products and FAQ’s. To help users better understand there reporting needs and help new users become acquainted quickly with the products.
To simplify the longlist survey creation process I added a progress bar so users know their location in the process and they can use it to go back to correct/check the input information
We rooted the product in the SASB Framework so I created SASB Button for SASB Topics and an Advanced Button which contains Environmental Topics from other Frameworks
Contact Manager is a database of all stakeholders and employees that is used to efficiently send surveys, request carbon emission information and share reports.
Prototyping
Given the sequence in which the Materiality Assessment is created prototyping was necessary to guide the design from the beginning. The complexity in the prototype ramped up as the design process continued.
Style Guide
The UI and visual elements needed to be expansive enough to allow for variation throughout the suite, while still being cohesive and consistent with the ESG Playbook Brand. Our research shows that blue = finance so I varied the hues of blue to be used throughout the platform. The fonts I used are Lato and Open Sans, both extremely popular, familiar and easily readable. For the components I went with squared boxy fields, distinctly separate to intuitively distinguish between the informational/input fields rows.
Note: The Materiality Matrix Builder is the only Application currently available for preview.
Materiality Matrix Builder
Next Steps:
Add additional products to ESG Playbook Suite including:
Benchmarking Tool
Carbon Report Builder