Unorganized process is an impediment for company growth

Lost receipts, unclear accounting and delayed payments — these all sounds like nightmares to superintendent, accountant and suppliers. Unorganized environment can also drag down efficiency and result in low morale and become stepping stones to company growth.

QuoteToMe is a startup that provides purchasing automation solutions for construction contractors that hopes to solve the above problems. This tech solution has processed $25million in purchasing volume as of December, 2021. QuoteToMe is connecting to 1,000+ suppliers and clients across North America and with the partnership combined value exceeding $1.5billion per year.

When discussing with the management team about what feature can provide great value to the QuoteToMe app. The team had gone through Scorecard exercise to define the business direction. We knew that allowing users to receive goods and services process was what we wanted to work on.

My job was to dive deeper through user research, in order to provide solid information to prove our speculations, transferred ideas to user-friendly designs, and finally measure the design successful rate through survey and data analytic tools for future improvements.

Research, user interview, user journey map, redesign the entire experience, prototyping, test prototype with users, follow up user feedback on survey and measure user experience in data.

Different design task has somewhat different design flow but they are more or less the same. Since this feature needs more attention on discovery and UX improvement. I proposed the process should be

1. User interview →User Profile → User Journey Map → User Flow → Low to Mid-Fi→ Iteration → User testing and Redesign → Hi-Fi
2. Release → Survey and data → User feedback followup → User interview
3. Repeat (back to the continuous iteration and user testing loop)

User interview

1. Identify user - it is important to know key persons involved in the story, so we can start creating user profile, user story, draw down the relationship between stakeholders. We get the idea of who might get involved through the business flow of the general ordering/receiving flow. The key user will be the person who makes the order, the person who sends out the order, and the person who pays the bill. We identify users can be site superintendents (order), suppliers (supply) and company accountant (payment).
2. Find and contact user - We then got the potential user list to contact from through our management team, sales team and CS team. Management and sales team are often who has accumulate abundant connections and resources in the industry, so it’s often easier for them to help set up for user interview.
3. Made cold calls and send out invitation for user interview

User Profile

After sessions of user interviews, we identify the key pain point for our user. This is the user profile I draw —

User journey map

Miro is a great tool to collect and organize thoughts coming from users. From the user journey map, I got more familiar with the user behavior upon the receiving process. I noted down questions I wanted to clarify with our team or users through next user testing. I also discussed with the project manager about the potential features that we can consider at this stage.

User flow

There are advantages to work with a project manager on user flow and let me tell you why.

1. Time saving: This is a good chance for both of us to identify what steps user will get through, so not only I can vision what the design will look like. Project manager can also organize flows into individual design/dev tasks on the project management tools, such as Trello, Asana or Shortcut.
2. Define MVP: Companies usually have limited design and dev resources unless you have unlimited funding and times. It is important to define what to build first and why (right direction, matching executive roadmaps, bring the company most revenue at the moment). This is the stage where we can discuss together before the going for wireframes.

Wireframes and continuous iterations

For the design, I took the component that are already built as a foundation and build on top of it. I made over 10 iterations. We have paused this feature for more thoughts, user testings and wait for the right time to build it. By saying right time, I mean as a startup. We have some features needed to be done first so we can build this later on. Take a glance at a few iterations that I had made —

I also paired up the design for our mobile phone so user can access to this feature from both devices. You can check the selected flow of this feature.

The design provides users an easy checkbox for what they have received, it also provides a counting tools for users to track the number of back-order or any partially received items. Site superintendent can take photos and upload it upon the receiving phase. The system will sync uploaded documents to the team and accountants automatically. Site supers do not need to keep the receipts and worry about losing it. Accountants do not have to chase the site supers at the end of the month and worry about which order is correct and which she should pay for the suppliers.

Testing, release and feedback

The feature had gone through several internal and external testings before releasing it. We designed the release announce — as a banner ad and pop-up ad on both web and mobile to show users that this feature will online at a specific date so we will not surprise users.

This feature has gained positive feedback and appreciations from our users.

We have greatly reduced the amount of re-work required by our accounting and operations team and provided improved POs to our suppliers in one seamless sweep. — Derrick Voogd, from Synergy

We use it for everything, from small consumable orders to service agreements like street sweeping and water hauling. — Jordan Auld, from Clark Builders

I just did one, and it was so easy!! It is so great that you guys keep improving things. I really like how much you guys help us out and it works out really well. — Matt Tawrgownik from Bockstael

KPIs and Followups

I have been the big advocator of the UX culture since the first day I joined QuoteToMe. I am happy that we are now using UX analytic tool, Mixpanel, to get better insight into user engagement, retaintion rate, and conversion rate.

We can see the latest month, the product of Receive of Goods has over 96% of completion rate. (Completion rate = Received in full/(Received in full + Not completed)x100)

The survey questions and sent out to users. I followed up with users who left their contact information through the survey we sent out, in order to get more information on how to improve our feature in the near future.

Final

“Iterations” seem to be every designer’s destiny, me included. I think the successful of this feature “Receive of Goods”could result in the following 3 points —

1. Simplicity
2. Usability and accessibility
3. Data support

The product is easy to use, and the result is measurable. However, not all features are as successful as this one. I also have some features that are still lying in the graveyard of Figma and wait to be brought alive again. This “Receive of Good” feature was once in a graveyard for almost 8 months as well.

It taught me that sometimes when a feature is not being built, it might be business directions is going another way, the timing was just not there yet, or the product wasn’t mature enough for it. Knowing what key feature needs to be built and if it is going to bring company the most value is the top priority to think about.

Now I see again, I am happy that we released this feature now instead of 8 months ago. We could have ended accumulated quite some design debt. Hope you all find your right moment to build the product and have little design debt! (This should be my new year’s resolution)

Cheers and Merry Christmas!