INPENSA — Software redesign

Role: Research & Design | Duration: 3 Weeks | Status: Ongoing

Overview

Our client, Inpensa, needed to revamp the UI and navigability of their product. The task was to revitalize the look and feel of the product, create better data layouts & visualizations, and the navigability of the product.

The Team

The research and design responsibilities were divided among the team, which consisted 2 other UX designers and myself. My role was research captain and I was responsible for figuring out what methods and materials were needed to drive the project forward to completion.

About Inpensa

Inpensa is an innovative SaaS Technology and Advisory Services company focused on delivering solutions to organizations to better define project spend through strategic planning and prioritization, review and analyze via business case management, and track the value received even beyond the life of the investment. Inpensa’s software extends to Fortune 500 companies such as Bank of America, and Cisco.

Problem statement

When analysts & executives are using the Inpensa software, they find navigation and data manipulation & viewing to be an inefficient process.

How might we redesign the experience to create a more efficient and delightful interaction?

Research Phase

To start off, we created a business model canvas to first understand the value of our client and their product. Afterwards, we performed a heuristic evaluation of their existing product in order to understand its capabilities and limitations.

Since the product was really technical and niche, our target users were really specific; we needed users who works in finance and data entry/analysis. Luckily, our client were able to set us up interviews with their clients.

Research Insights

From the feedback that we got from Inpensa’s QA team and user interviews with their clients, we discovered that:

• Users work with a lot of data and need to be able to view most of it. The current software allows expandability, but the viewports are still too restricted.
• Users frequently found editing data to be cumbersome. The number of clicks it takes to complete it was too high.
• Users want their work on Inpensa to be more efficient.
• The learning curve was too hard. Clients constantly had to keep training new employees on how to use the product and it was an inconvenience.

Research Limitations

Because of the holidays and the technicality of the product, our pool of users to interview from was limited. We were not able to cast a wide net to capture more users; users who would be using a software such as this.

Also, doing competitive feature research was restricted because similar companies did not offer access to their product unless you were granted a demo.

Personas

So, based on research we came up with 2 personas that represented Inpensa’s target audience; the analyst and the executive.

After gathering the data we needed, we were ready to start coming up with solutions to the challenges.

Design Phase

Our team performed a series of design studio to come up with solutions to the needs and pain points and this is what we came up with:

Solution to the number of clicks

One of the needs of our client was to reduce the number of clicks to finish a task by 20%. As we have discovered in our interviews, executives manage 25–30 projects at once and need to make edits and changes to each.

This is a visual representation of the task flow of a project manager trying to manage his portfolio of projects:

Our proposed solution would resolve the number of clicks by 80%.

Usability Test

The goal was to test its aesthetics, and see if users were able to intuitively understand our proposed new way of navigation and task completion for the task that executives partake in, which is to approve a project.

Usability Test — Round 1 findings

Key takeaways:

• Users liked the overall user interface of the project. While they weren’t able to understand all the details of the page, they understood where to locate the features.
• Users were looking for a quick way to access “New Ideas” directly from the dashboard page, but 75% of the users quickly realized its location once they hovered over the “PlanIQ” button at the top most navigation.
• 75% of the users were unsure what the next steps would be once they got to the tabbed layout after creating a new idea.
• Consistency between the editing and moving between tabs helped improve learnability going through the different steps.

Prototype

Prototype link here

Usability Test — Round 2 findings

Key takeaways:

• Addition of the “Next” button helped users understand the sequence of steps that they had to do.
• Increasing the size of the “View as: PlanIQ” toggle helped improve its visibility. Users instinctively still went through the “CaseIQ” and “TraqIQ” buttons at the top nav.
• The addition of the “Input Status: X%” , it wasn’t as effective because it blended with the rest of the information on the top. 100% of users did not think it contained information pertaining to the completion status of their workflow.

Next Steps

To move this project forward, we would need to:

• Perform an A/B testing with the current software and the redesign with Inpensa’s clients.
• Speak with the dev. team to see what is feasible for them and understand if there are any limitations and restrictions to our proposed design.