Do the Right Thing

The Problem

An ethics reporting portal holds the most sensitive data an employer ever touches: harassment, discrimination, retaliation, fraud. The person filling it out is often frightened, and is usually deciding in real time whether they can trust the company enough to press submit. "Do the Right Thing" had to earn that trust everywhere at once: across every brand under the swoosh (Nike, Converse, Hurley, Jordan), in every market and language, online or by phone.

The catch: the system underneath was not ours. It ran on EthicsPoint, the compliance platform from the third party NAVEX Global. My job on Nike's Experience Innovation team was to design a Nike-grade experience on top of a vendor's backend I did not control.

I came to it from the other side of the same promise. The year before, I had designed Speak Up, the training that helps Nike people find the courage to raise a concern. This was where that courage had to land.

What I Built

Out of the box, EthicsPoint is a legal intake form: built to log a case, not to hold the person filing it. I designed and prototyped Nike's branded version end to end, from the landing a reporter first sees to the front-end code the vendor would build it from:

A landing that sets the tone. "Do the Right Thing," in Nike's voice, with three clear doors: report a concern, ask a question, follow up.
Triage that respects the moment. Where are you, where did it happen, what happened, with that last question fanning out into ten concern categories, from harassment to fraud, without making a scared person read a legal manual.
A reporting flow built around anonymity. A private report key lets someone check back and answer follow-up questions later without ever revealing who they are.

Two of those triage questions look alike and are not. "Where are you" and "where did it happen" are separate fields on purpose: legal protections and routing differ by country, so a reporter sitting in one market and describing an incident in another can say both, and the report goes where it is actually owed.

Nike Ethics Point "Report a Concern" triage screen: a "Where are you" country selector for the reporter's own location, a "Call any time" block offering a confidential phone line as an alternative to reporting online, a separate "Where did it happen" country selector for where the concern occurred, and a "What happened" list of the full concern taxonomy, Discrimination, Harassment, Conflict of Interests, Substance Abuse, Financial Reporting and Accounting, Retaliation, Corruption and Fraud, Privacy, Misuse of Nike Resources, and Quality and Product Safety, each with a "More info" button.

Finding Nike's Voice

The landing did not start in Nike's voice. The first version had the right bones and nothing else: the "Do the Right Thing" headline, three empty image wells, placeholder Latin where the explanation belonged, and buttons that read "Button."

Nike Ethics Point "Do the Right Thing" landing, first version: the bold headline sits over placeholder Latin body text and three empty gray image wells, each labeled Report a Concern, Ask a Question, or Follow Up above a black button that reads "Button."

By the third round, the same three doors did the real work. An eyebrow set the frame, "Nike is committed to." Two short paragraphs named the arrangement in plain language: NAVEX runs the platform, your report goes there first, and you can stay anonymous, with any identifying detail held back from Nike unless you decide otherwise. Photography replaced the empty wells, and the call to action changed from "Button" to "Start here." That finished landing is the page at the top of this study.

The distance between that skeleton and this page is the actual job: taking a vendor's form and making it sound like Nike and read as safe, so the one person who most needs to trust it can.

Designing With a Third Party

The hard part was not the visual design. It was the boundary. The data model, the submission logic, and the follow-up mechanics belonged to NAVEX; the trust and the brand belonged to Nike. Every place the vendor's logic showed through was a place the experience could read as a transaction instead of a person being heard, and the job was to find each one and cover it with something a scared person could trust.

Anonymity is the clearest case. On a compliance platform the easy path is to ask "do you want to be anonymous?" up front, as a checkbox, and move on. I made it the last question instead. A reporter tells the whole story first, names names or not, and only then decides whether to attach their own identity, with the contact fields appearing only if they opt in. Staying anonymous is never a box you check before you have said anything; it is a door left open after you have already been heard.

Nike Ethics Point report form, lower section: after fields describing the person involved, where and when it happened, and how the reporter became aware, a "How do you want to report this matter?" heading asks "Would you prefer to remain anonymous for this report?" with Yes and No options, and an identity block, First Name, Last Name, Phone Number, Email Address, and relationship to Nike, that applies only if the reporter chooses to be identified, above a "Submit" button.

That wording had to hold up for more than one owner at once. There was no usability test to run here, and that was the point: you cannot ethically test a live harassment-reporting flow on the frightened people it is for. So validation moved to the people who owned the constraints instead: Nike's brand, the HR and compliance functions that owned the legal language, and NAVEX, whose platform ran underneath. I walked each of them through the reporter's path in a clickable prototype, version after version, revising the wording until it held for all three at once.

Why It Matters

The last screen a reporter reaches opens with three words: "Thank you for your courage." Then it says what happens next, who reads the report, and how to follow up later with the private key you set, so the hardest click someone makes that day does not end in silence.

Nike Ethics Point confirmation screen: a large "Thank you for your courage" message, a placeholder confirmation number, a reminder to keep the password set on the previous step, and a "What happens next" section explaining that a NAVEX reviewer will follow up through the contact method provided and route the report to the right team at Nike.

The screens here are prototypes, FPO placement markers and placeholder confirmation numbers included. That honesty is the point. This was Experience Innovation work: a prototype built to prove a reporter-first pattern. I packaged Nike's own front-end for NAVEX to build from: its CSS framework, its glyph set, a dedicated mobile confirmation screen. That buildable spec was the deliverable, and it was where my scope ended. The platform build and the market-by-market rollout were NAVEX's to carry. What I owned was the pattern, proven and handed over: one flow that had to hold for every brand and market under the swoosh, in the worst moment of someone's working life.

This is the same problem I build Calafai on now. The most valuable data is also the most sensitive, and a tool only works if the person using it trusts what happens to what they put in. Whether it is an employee reporting misconduct or an executive handing over their strategy, the job is the same: design for dignity, be honest about what the system does with it, and you earn the right to hold something that matters.