Allocadia - Budget Transfers

 

The Challenge

Budget Transfers allows movement of money around financial targets and budgets. The customers can request and approve fund transfers between folders/activity plans. The users find there are usability and utility issues in using this feature. Our goal is to improve the ease of use and tracking for budget transfers.

Usability Issues:

  • Efficiency - The users spend lot of time and effort in completing tasks like navigating the hierarchy in transfer form, filling up the form fields, manually updating targets

  • Errors - The users find it hard to recover from errors in filling transfer form

  • Satisfaction - The users find there is need to improve the ease of use in filling forms and recovering from errors

Utility Issues:

  • Lack of visibility into transfer history

The Team

1 UX Designer, 1 Product Manager, 1 Engineer Lead, 2 Developers

My Role

I was responsible for building a shared understanding of the problem space through problem framing, sketching workshops, creating mockups and interactive prototypes.

  • Conduct user interviews, stakeholder interviews, literature review to understand the problem space.

  • Facilitate workshops to build alignment and drive participation through ideation exercises.

  • Design a solution to help marketers complete the task quickly and efficiently

  • Make the feature intuitive and easy to use

  • Validate the solutions and design decisions with usability testing

Pain Points

Research helped to understand the context and identify the pain points for the users

  • Navigation - It was difficult for the users to navigate the hierarchy structure and find the correct location using the transfer request form. With deep hierarchies, the users spent lot of time scrolling and lack of visibility into parent folder made it difficult to verify if the right budget was selected.

  • Difficult to recover from error - It was difficult for the user to the user to rectify the mistake and easily recover from errors. There was no way to minimize the consequence of errors or backtrack any wrong transaction except for creating a new entry with correct details. This means lot of time and effort for the user that makes the whole process tedious and frustrating.
    Lack of visibility into transfer history - The users did not feel confident while using this feature as there was no way to track the transfer history to verify transactions and future period planning

The Solution

  • View the expandable and collapsible hierarchy: The enhancement would enable the user to see where they are in the hierarchy and limit scrolling using expandable and collapsible hierarchy structure.It will increase accuracy and prevent errors in selecting the wrong budget.

  • Edit the request: The edit functionality would enable the users to make changes to the request and recover from errors.

  • Audit trail: This would help the user to verify the entries and feel confident that they have made the right transfer and use the data to guide them for future period planning.

The Process

Discovery - User Research

During the discovery phase phase, I conducted a kickoff workshop at the beginning to align with the key stakeholders about the objectives of this phase. I collaborated with business, product manager, engineering leads and other internal stakeholders to:

  • research the landscape and get a clear picture of the users and their goals

  • define the challenge and the right problem to solve

  • gather insights about the existing workflow and align on the first steps

I adopted JTBD (Jobs to be done) framework to understand the users, context, how and why they need to do budget transfers. I used these insights to uncover themes/patterns to identify unmet needs. Once I have defined the scope of the problem and the unmet need based on the prioritization matrix, I conduced problem framing exercises to build a shared understanding of the problem space

Job Map

Exploration

The next step of the design process involves the whole squad including the product manager and engineers to ideate and create the best possible solution. To gain more empathy and design better solutions, I walk them through design exercises such as:

  • Needs Statement

  • As-is scenario mapping

  • Assumptions/Questions/Ideas

  • Sketching

Pain points 1: Difficult to navigate hierarchy structure

Pain points 2: Difficult to recover from errors

Pain points 3: Lack of visibility of transfer history to track budget transfers and verify transactions

 

Problem framing exercise - Needs statement

Journey mapping exercise - As-is scenario map

As part of the design process, I conduct usability testing with internal stakeholders (Support, Customer Success and Professional Services teams) and users to validate design decisions and identify any unforeseen usability issue.

Improvised solution (mockups):

Solution for pain point 1 - Type in search and expandable and collapsible hierarchy structure

Solution for pain point 2 - Enable editing of transfer requests to easily recover from errors

Solution for pain point 3 - Increase visibility of audit trail to track budget transfers and verify transactions

Results:

The users find the feature enhancements to be helpful as it makes the form easy to use. They feel satisfied and confident while interacting with the feature as it increases accuracy and prevents error.