BitAge provides a B2B digital experience through an ERP platform served in Saas mode for accounting, invoicing, resource planning and more. They cater to accountants and small/medium companies in a variety of sectors.
ERP stands for Enterprise Resource Planning. The platform is accessible as a website for users to accomplish complex tasks such as book keeping, handling company’s finances, manage stock and customers database.
As the Lead Product Designer I was responsible for redesigning the entire platform and reshaping the user journey shifting it towards a 100% user centered approach.
KEY PROJECT FEATURES
| Type | Saas (Software as a Service) accessible via web browser |
| Device | Desktop First |
| Industry | Finance, Software, Tech, Banking, B2B | Tools | Photoshop, Sketch, InVision, InVision DSM, Slack, Team Viewer |
Context
The software was still in its first version (entirely designed by developers and engineers) and no graphic design or usability issues had been tackled. With this project the aim was to develop a new UI aimed at solving all usability issues while restyling the graphic layout.
Challenges
Given the complexity of the tasks, the large amount of features and legal requirements accompanying this kind of softwares, issues such as usability and error prevention are key and need to be addressed effectively. Especially in a context were the service is used extensively (on a wide array of features) and intensively (many hours a day) by a relevant number of employees for each customer.
My role
Apply design thinking approach to find the underlying causes of the problems and decrease the chances of “human error” while allowing users to learn as they go, thus shifting the company’s approach from a training driven one to a more user and learner friendly design. Given the complexity of the tasks, the idea was that without the right interface some tasks became simply impossible to perform because requiring too much knowledge from the user. This was achieved by leveraging the concept of affordances and signifiers, using product constraints to help the user be taught by the product how to use it.
Work
In the discovery phase I performed a deep user research via phone and meetings with users. The process was driven by an extensive use of the”five whys” procedure, this allowed us to avoid focusing just on the obvious errors and discover the hidden ones as well. Then we developed a testing script aimed at tackling simple tasks that had shown issues in the past and started by sketching the prototype of the new version of the related pages. This allowed us to identify some quick wins that were deployed in the full prototype along with a design system which proved much more effective and performant through a clearer taxonomy of elements, disambiguation of symbols, etc.
BEFORE
AFTER
Results
Using design to prevent errors or lessen their cost resulted in a 37% decrease in time needed to accomplish monitored key tasks and in 53% reduction of phone calls to customer center.
Key takeaways
Using design thinking to identify the root issues of the platform allowed us to improve the usability of the platform thus reducing the costs of using the platform (both psichological and and in terms of time) for users and cutting the costs of support for the customer.