Cyril Stephen - Product Designer

improving workflow Efficiency by 50% For Axways' e-Invoicing Solution

Axway’s newly developed, beta e-Invoicing platform suffered from usability gaps driven by engineering-led development. I advocated for user research, studied how our power users actually worked with the old e-Invoicing platform and redesigned a core, error-finding workflow for the beta platform. The redesign improved efficiency, reducing steps by 50%.

timeline

6 weeks

team

Cyril Stephen, Marcus Chang

my role

User Research & Synthesis, Ideation, UI Design & Prototyping

the product

What is Axway e-Invoicing? B2B invoices need to be regulatory compliant, and Axway's e-Invoicing Solution makes this possible by automating the flow of invoices between enterprises and trading partners, and transforming the invoices during this flow to make them compliant with regulatory laws

This is made possible by integrating Axways’ e-Invoicing solution with existing Accounts Payable/Receivable (accounting) software used by enterprise companies. Once that’s completed, the process starts by receiving an invoice from a sender (supplier), which is then transformed/processed to be regulatory compliant, before being sent to the receiver (buyer).

the users

We had two personas - Operations team (power users) and enterprise AP/AR (accounting) professionals (secondary USers)

Operations team: Using the platform, they analyze customer accounts (customers of e-Invoicing), spot failed invoices, and fix invoices. Once fixed, they process an invoice again to ensure it is complaint with the regulations.

AP/AR professionals: They primarily use the platform to review the status of invoices that have been sent/received.

how i got started

the product team knew that the engineering-led, newly developed uI had severe usability issues. i was brought in as the first designer onto the team to bring in a fresh set of eyes and to give my take on how we could improve the usability of the platform

While I knew nothing about the product at this time, I jumped in and applyed a heuristic lens to what was newly developed. Turns out, there were a lot of problems.

learning the product

What Went Wrong: The new platform was developed without considering how our users were using the platform. I pushed back on usability improvements (which really meant UI improvements according to the team) and advocated for research first.

stakeholder alignment

First Win & Constraint: Got the green light to conduct research on how our users were using the existing platform, but we had to limit ourselves to our power users due to timeline constraints

The goal was simple - learn what tasks they currently use the platform for, how they go about performing those tasks, and what problems they face while using the platform. This would not only allow us to uncover needs and problems, but also identify opportunities that can be pursued down the line.

research

I planned and conducted A two-part Research Study with our power users (Users interviews & observational study), and uncovered a few interesting findings

Operations team are always feeling overwhelmed

On average, 150 invoices fail each day. Delays in resolving them lead to SLA breaches that heighten their stress.

01.

'Error Finding' workflow is repetitive for all failed invoices

Fixing a failed invoice involves two steps: ‘Error Finding’ and ‘Error Troubleshooting’. The first step looks identical across all cases.

02.

'Error Finding' workflow demanded too much effort

The Operations team had to move across multiple screens just to view an invoice’s status and understand why it failed.

03.

AP/AR professionals depend on Operations to explain failures

In their rush to fix failed invoices, AP/AR professionals reach out to the Operations team to understand why an invoice has failed.

04.

Converge

While the research surfaced multiple issues, 'Error Finding' workflow stood out for its frequency and impact.

The main risk, however, was that our knowledge of AP/AR professionals having the same challenge came through the Operations team, not direct research.

After assessing the potential value to both user groups, the effort required, and our confidence in the insights, we decided to work on improving the 'Error Finding' experience.

While the research surfaced multiple issues, 'Error Finding' workflow stood out for its frequency and impact.

The main risk, however, was that our knowledge of AP/AR professionals having the same challenge came through the Operations team, not direct research.

After assessing the potential value to both user groups, the effort required, and our confidence in the insights, we decided to work on improving the 'Error Finding' experience.

ideation

To get started, I first mapped out the existing flow, and worked out something new which We thought was promising

ideation

The solution was obvious - clearly Surface invoice Status, and make it easy to find error details

The old interface was missing the status information for invoices, so that needed to be added to the 'Documents' screen for the new redesign. Since the beta UI already had an 'Invoice Detail' screen developed, we now simply needed a way to connect both screens.

final solution

Bringing the solution to life: Documents Screen

impact

Impact: We Estimated The Workflow efficiency improvement to be ~50%

By surfacing information earlier and having links between relevant pages, users no longer had to go through the various pages that they needed to before.