User-Centred Design: The Key to Paperchase’s Success
UX design is a fascinating and dynamic field, with a lot of different theories and approaches being discussed, and often, heatedly debated. User-Centered design (the practice of involving users at every stage of the design process) is not one of those hotly contested trends. Indeed, the idea of having your design process focus on the user’s needs is so fundamentally logical that it often seems like the only possible way anybody could go about designing anything at all. Surprisingly though, it’s not. The techniques and methods of user-centered design had to be thoughtfully developed and formally established.
We won’t be getting into the gritty details of the exact process here though; it has been documented more than sufficiently across the internet for a long while now. Instead, we’ll look at a real-world example of just how user-centric design can make a huge difference to the outcome of a product.
In some ways, design is not unlike making a cup of tea for a friend. If you really wanted to make them a cup of tea they’d enjoy, you wouldn’t just pick your own favorite flavor and hope for the best. You’d ask them how they like their tea. Do they take sugar? Milk? Lemon? Perhaps they drink green tea? Or perhaps they don’t want tea at all. Designing a product is just like that. In order to come up with a design solution that actually works, the designer first needs to really understand the user. What do they like or dislike? What do they need?
During the design process of Paperchase, we came across several fascinating insights from users that shaped the final outcome of the project.
Take, for example, our research for the eDocs module. We discovered — much to our surprise — that users were playing a guessing game when uploading invoices via the mobile app; they were left wondering if their uploads were successful, and would have to remember to check their upload history after around ten minutes to see if everything had gone through. One user talked to us at length about the confusion he faced with the app. As a new user, he had initially been under the impression that scanning invoices on the app would automatically share them with his accountants. Instead, he was unknowingly creating a draft list, a fact he only realized after receiving a call from the Paperchase team about all the missing invoices!
We used these insights to redesign the app in a step-by-step workflow, that handholds users through scanning, editing, and getting invoices ready to upload. When the user hits the (very hard to miss) Upload button, the app provides a detailed report confirming each invoice’s successful journey to the cloud. And if there’s a hiccup, like a server error, the app promptly alerts the user of the failed upload and prompts them to give those troublesome invoices another go. This way, we’re making sure our clients don’t have any unpleasant surprises down the line.
It’s these small touches that truly tailor our designs to fit like a glove for our customers’ needs. Every pixel, every interaction is like a carefully chosen thread in a tapestry, weaving together a user experience that’s not just functional but also feels intuitive and frictionless for the user who’s just trying to go about their life and get their work done. By paying attention to our users’ needs, we ensure our designs turn ‘that was easy!’ into an everyday experience, rather than a pleasant surprise.
Keeping the user involved and focusing your design decisions around their needs is not just a good practice; it’s the only way to make sure the end result makes sense for the people using it.
