Overview
My Role: Senior UX Designer
Company: Infor
Team: Senior Product Director, UX Team Lead, Senior Developers, Developer Liaison, Business Analysts, Solutions Consultants
Duration: 18 Months
Our product team was tasked with the opportunity to build a financial tool from scratch so that we could empower healthcare organizations with relevant, timely cost data resulting in more affordable, better quality care for patients.
Challenges
Cost accounting is a complex system to learn, and we did not have subject-matter experts to guide us.
No early access to end users to understand goals, needs, and current landscape for cost accountants.
Difficult to get analytical data for any product because they were on-premise solutions that had yet to go through the SaaS transformation.
Process
Designing Features Using Job Stories
We began our process by first surfacing and understanding the “why”. We wrote job stories in Google Docs using content from project requirements and cost accounting epics in order to understand and identify users and their motivations.
EXAMPLE JOB STORY:
A cost accountant or consultant will most likely design the cost models, allocation rules and cost ratio calculations:
When my organization needs to know how to budget their money and resources, I want to create logic-based rules and algorithms that help the organization understand where money/resources are going so that they can better spend to save.
These job stories helped me and the UX Lead design core features for TrueCost. Utilizing a design research method called Presumptive Design, I designed wireframes based off of these core features and content and validated using usability testing sessions with end users and data analytics later on.
TrueCost Summit
At this point, our company’s annual conference, Inforum, was fast approaching. Stakeholders of the project believed that this would be a great opportunity to share a clickable prototype of TrueCost with current and prospective customers to get early buy-in.
In order to make this quick turnaround, as the only designer on the team I suggested an in-person Alignment Workshop in our Manhattan Office. Three full workshop days were approved, and TrueCost Summit was born.
Deck compiled of wireframes I designed and shared with the team during the summit
From one of many collaborative sessions
Inforum
Several weeks after my team hosted our first TrueCost Summit, we were ready to present an interactive prototype I designed to users at Inforum, held at the Javits Center in New York City.
Inforum 2017!
Our fearless UX Team Lead, Isha, along with Liz, one of Infor’s Design System Team’s experts! Liz was wonderful to collaborate with when we moved to the visual design phase of TrueCost.
USER TESTING AT INFORUM
We conducted user testing sessions during our conference. Despite our TrueCost Summit being an internal success, 90% of participants informed my team that our cost model flow did not align with how cost modelling actually worked.
Prototype my team shared with users to validate earlier design decisions
REVISITING CONTENT
During our team’s post-Inforum Retrospective, we agreed that our main blocker appeared to be the content. Our next approach would need to prioritize understanding and organizing the content in a more seamless, user-friendly manner in order for cost accountants to get their work done well, done faster, and done without the headache.
I’ve had positive experiences in the past designing various types of content flows in situations when trying to understand, organize, and/or generate content. I decided to move away from wireframes and try this approach instead. The annotations I included for the TrueCost Summit worked really well in a collaborative setting, so I continued to add notations for team members as well.
Outcome
Our work paid off. Infor TrueCost, a component of Infor CloudSuite Financials and Supply Management, became available in September 2018. This solution empowers healthcare organizations with relevant, timely cost data.
Access to data helps users quickly identify where margin improvements can be made, which can result in more affordable, better quality care.
