This project consists of designing multiple internal business applications created over 3 years. The client was a huge company with a billion CZK in revenue.
Problems to solve
When we came to help the company with their internal systems, they were mostly using just Excel tables to operate everything. These files not only took more than 10 minutes to even open, but it was not connected together and there was a big delay with communication between different parts of the company.
Besides some math in the excel tables, nothing was automated and the tasks each department had to fulfill took too much time. Incompatible user interface of the spreadsheets and performance of a large excel table was also a problem.
My approach to solve the problem
My task was to create new web apps from scratch that would speed up the process of each company department and that would help the departments to communicate with each other and share their data.
At first, I had to work through some distrust on the company side, because they had no experience with UX design and opening up in general. By showing the management my design process and how is the input of the employees helpful, I was able to communicate directly with the specific employees, which seemed impossible at the beginning. This was crucial for me to create the best tools possible.
The communication and research consisted of two parts. I worked with the employees to understand their workflow and the problems they see in the current system. I created few mockups and prototypes for them to interact with and to better discuss the issues. Second part was to talk with managers about their global vision, business model and how the apps can move the company forward.
Outcome
As a result of my work, departments like pruchase, pricing or sales had their own web applications that they are using every day as a part of their work. Some of the tasks were speeded up from weeks to days and a lot of manual work was automated. That enabled the employees to focus on different types of work than just filling up endless spreadsheets and reduced the costs of big tasks that had to be done every few months.