And here it is… our first design session!

Written by: Mika Xiang Gu —April 10th 2018

Design is a form of research. — Karen Berntsen

If you have been following our medium blog on the previous account, you must have noticed that our team has been crawling through the research phase for the past three months. After rounds and rounds of secondary, analogous and primary research synthesis and analysis, our team is finally moving towards the design phase. (YAY!!!)

Thanks to all our research participants, we are now proudly and confidently the most knowledgeable people about procure-to-payment process in HCI. Over the past week, our team has been wrapped our heads around all the information we have collected so far. By employing a variety of design methods, we developed three design ideas that are immensely valuable to the problem spaces we have identified. Below are some of the design methods we used:

Storyboard and Speed Dating

In order to validate our hypotheses and assumptions we reached out to analogous users, showing them 4 storyboards generated from our visioning sessions, and gathered their feedback.

Concept Refinement

Based on the feedback we received in the speed dating session, we broke into two mini teams and employed a design method called brainwriting to get the creative juice flowing. We then sketched out the 3 different design ideas that turned into mid-fidelity interface mockups.

Design idea 1: Automatic input

This design idea is inspired by storyboard 1: Payment box. When users have to manually match invoice or input data, there would be a high possibility of human error. In order to address the problem, our team came up with the idea of intelligent payment routing. In this case, invoice information would be captured by the system that the user is using and automatically input into payment processing modules, and tagged for approval. By reducing the manual process, this design solution would lead to less human error and more efficient invoice-to-payment workflow.

Design idea 2: Task tabs instead of module tabs

Design idea 2 and 3 are inspired by storyboard 4: Tailored functionality based on users needs. One of the main insights merging from our research is that users still need to take time to familiarize themselves with daily tasks due to the high learning curve of the software. All the users we interviewed so far felt like the product is not made for them. In order to address that problem, our team came up with the idea of task-oriented interface. Rather than modules focused, a task-oriented interface would help users to collaborate effortlessly with other team members and give users feedbacks and instructions in terms of where they are in the process. Over time, the system will also memorize the required modules for each tasks, and make suggestions to new users coming in.

Design idea 3: Removing unused fields & reducing cognitive loads

During our interviews, we noticed users were facing a high cognitive loads as they performed daily tasks related to P2P. Users have developed their own ways of manoeuvring around it. Through our interviews, we also noticed that there are a huge amount of input fields in the UI that people don’t end up using. Instead of providing a solution that would ask people upfront about what they do/fields they need, our solution would observe users’ mouse click patterns with and start removing fields from the system that people don’t use. This will help declutter the UI, and make the interface more intuitive for the user.

All that being said, we are finally getting to interview and test design ideas with PNC clients from across the globe next week at the PNC User Group Conference in Baltimore! Stay tuned for our next week’s blog — it will be a fruitful week of making design and research simultaneously.