Axway

B2B invoices need to be regulatory compliant, and Axway's E-Invoicing Solution makes this possible by 1) automating the flow of invoices between enterprises and trading partners, and 2) transforming the invoices during this flow to make them compliant with local regulatory laws.

This is made possible by integrating Axway's e-Invoicing Solution with existing Accounts Payable/Receivable (accounting) products used by enterprises. Once integrated, the process starts by receiving an invoice from a sender (supplier), which is then transformed and processed to be regulatory compliant before being sent to the receiver (buyer).

We had two user groups: the Operations team (power users) and AP/AR accounting professionals (secondary users)

Leadership was concerned about growing UX complaints from enterprise users (our secondary user group), especially the younger demographic who were quickly replacing the older enterprise workforce. As the first designer on an engineering-led team, I had to establish a design process from scratch and earn buy-in from stakeholders unfamiliar with design's value.

To get up to speed quickly, I applied a heuristic lens to the newly developed platform.

Turns out, there were a lot of problems.

The initial ask was to follow an existing design system from another product team for UI modernization.

I pushed back and advocated for user research first, since users had never been a part of this product's development.

I got the green light to conduct user research, but accessing enterprise users was off the table since the team had previously struggled to recruit them. We focused on our Operations Team (power users) instead.

The goal of this discovery research was simple: learn what tasks users perform on the platform, how they go about them, and what problems they face.

Through user interviews and observational studies with our power users, I uncovered a few interesting findings

Of all the problems research surfaced, we chose to focus on "Diagnosis."

It delivered the highest impact for the least lift, accelerating Operations while reducing inbound support from enterprise users.

The existing Diagnosis flow was tedious, requiring users to navigate through seven screens to find why an invoice failed

The solution was to cut irrelevant screens and surface key information earlier in the flow

The Documents screen was missing invoice status information, so that needed to be added. The Invoice Detail screen didn't need reworking, we just needed a way to connect both screens.

These screens weren't being removed from the product, just from the Diagnosis flow.

They were duplicates, originally laid out in this flow for developers who understood the technical infrastructure, long before Operations even existed.

They remained accessible elsewhere via the navigation menu.

The solution had to work within some tight constraints

The final solution introduced a Status column and Details link

Resolution time dropped by 67% in user testing, and our Operations team wanted it shipped

Feedback from my manager, who has overseen this product for over a decade