Journalism Trust Initiative Full Redesign

The Journalism Trust Initiative is a certification programme run by Reporters Without Borders. Media outlets apply, answer a long structured questionnaire about their editorial and ownership practices, and get audited by an external certification body. The whole thing runs on trust, and the digital side of it was working against that.

I worked on both halves: the public-facing website that explains the programme, and the internal platform where media outlets, certifiers and administrators actually do the work.

Media Certification Platform faced several challenges:

1. The existing platform lacked clarity in its purpose and was difficult to navigate for different user roles.
2. Media outlets struggled to understand how to engage with the certification process, while certifiers and administrators found it hard to manage evaluations and data efficiently.
3. The public website did not clearly communicate the journalism initiative mission or build trust with end users.
4. The JTI was fragmented across multiple digital platforms, making it difficult for users to access and trust the certification process.

I redesigned the public site and the internal platform as one product, so media outlets, certifiers and administrators all move through a single clear certification journey.

Key design improvements included:

1. A unified human-centered interface aligned with accessibility and clarity standards.
2. Role-based dashboards and guided workflows for different user types.
3. Streamlined submission and review flows for both certification and re-certification.
4. A public-facing site that promotes trust and visibility of transparency reports.

The previous JTI interface struggled with clarity and structure. Information was dense and visually similar, which made it difficult for users to quickly understand priorities, status, or next steps in the certification process. Navigation was not aligned with different user roles, so many users saw options that were irrelevant to them. As a result, workflows felt more complicated than they needed to be and completing tasks required unnecessary effort.

I Workshop

The first two weeks went entirely to research.

Access to the certification platform took a while to come through, and finding interview participants took longer still, so I started on the public-facing website instead. I ran a benchmark analysis and built a mood board for tone and structure. AI did the scanning: I pointed it at competitor platforms and had it cluster the patterns, which surfaced the UX conventions that keep recurring in media trust and certification products. That turned three or four days of manual comparison into one session. I walked into the stakeholder workshop with findings already sorted.

The workshop itself settled what the site is for. I ran it with stakeholders to pin down the mission, the audiences that matter and the content each one needs. Everyone wrote candidate mission statements and then spent three votes on the ones they thought carried it. The winning statement is what every page of the public site now traces back to.

II Workshop

The second workshop turned to the platform’s users. We identified and prioritised the core user groups, removed the redundant ones, and worked through the features each remaining group needed. The session ran as three tasks: persona creation, visual style definition and open brainstorming. We built the personas in pairs, two profiles per team, each covering a user’s motivations, their expectations of the platform and the obstacles they meet. Those three tasks produced the map of what the website was missing, in content and in functionality.

User Interviews

I interviewed current users of the JTI platform about how they work through certification and what they would change. After each session I ran the transcript through AI to pull out recurring patterns and any theme I had missed reading it myself. That took me from raw notes to a ranked insight map far faster. Nothing important stayed buried when I took the findings back to the team.

A key insight was that the website didn’t explain what media outlets gain from JTI certification, making its value unclear and discouraging engagement.

The user flow had to hold four roles without turning into four separate products. Media outlets move through registration, the transparency report and submission. Certifiers move through review, feedback and approval. Administrators monitor the workflow and keep the public directory current. Public visitors browse the directory and read the published reports, which is the whole point of the certification being public.

I built the design system out of the existing brand. Reporters Without Borders has a strong visual identity, and the certification programme had to read as part of it, so the system extends the existing colour, type and components.

The media outlet dashboard is where the completion problem lived. The old version opened on a wall of questions with no state. The new one opens on where the outlet stands, what is outstanding, and what happens next.

BeforeAfter

• Clear value proposition: A mission-driven homepage now explains what JTI is and why it matters at a glance.
• Certification benefits: Media outlets can see immediately what they gain from certification: visibility, trust and credibility.
• Human touch: JTI team profiles, office contacts and real success stories give the programme a face.
• Interactive global map: Visitors can explore certified media outlets by country, with filtering.
• Event access: Visitors can register for events and meet the JTI team in person.

• End to end certification journey: The flows now carry a user from self-assessment through to re-evaluation without losing them in between.
• Progress tracking: Progress bars and status indicators, Approved, To Revise and In Review, tell a user where they stand.
• Communication and collaboration: Collaborator management and certifier feedback moved inside the platform, off email.
• Transparency report handling: Publishing, previewing and sharing sit upfront, with Copy Link, Download and Submit for Certification as direct actions.
• Admin tooling: The admin dashboard filters, tracks and exports every certification, which is what made oversight possible.

Certification completion rose from 34% to 51%. Support requests dropped by roughly 38%, which matters because that support was being handled by a small team. Average certifier review time came down from around twenty-two days to around fifteen. Six of the seven stakeholders confirmed the redesign matched what they had described in the workshops.

The seventh had a fair objection about the questionnaire’s optional sections, and that thread was still open when the engagement ended.