Context
Poor business process automation could lead to development of complexities that affect business growth. We wanted to increase accessibility to solutions that can address these inefficiencies especially for the SMEs (Small & Medium Scale Enterprises)
The Problem
Forbes reports that companies lose 20 to 30 percent in revenue every year due to inefficiencies especially in business operations.
In total, repeated tasks cost businesses as much as 19 working days per year, per employee (Clockify)
Solutions like BizEdge exist; however, they are not accessible to small and medium businesses. This is due to either the high cost of acquisition or the absence of features suitable for SMEs.
The Objective
Research, strategize and design an end-to-end ERP (enterprise resource planning) solution to help businesses automate business operations, with a focus on eliminating repetitive tasks to improve productivity.
My Role
As the Head of Design, I led the product (4 product designers) and brand design (3 visual and brand designers) team through the research and design phase while acting as the primary stakeholder and intermediary between the product owners (board) and the design team. My topmost responsibility was to ensure balance between the business and user goals to achieve the set objective.
Our Approach
Empathise
Research Phase
For this, we leverage secondary data sources and focus group studies. The group comprised of professionals across different fields in business
Focus group participants
Human resource manager. business owners, freelancer, Operations manager, accountants.
Key Insights
- 75% have different multiple apps exist for core functions.
- > 60% unpleasant switching between apps
- Insights were a core requirement
- Lack of comprehensive insights across apps.
Conceptualise
- Understand key pain points
- Structure insights (seeking trend)
- Present synthesis to stakeholders
Personas
Oluwatoyin (Toyin) Kemi - Owner, SipMe Organics
53 years Entrepreneur Manage business successfully.
“I want us to make good profits but not without people profiting”
Toyin is an entrepreneur, a mum and grandma of two grandchildren. She owns a chain of organic food shops where she provides eat-in and take away service to her customers.
- Comprehensive business insight
- Monitor units activities
- Improve employee productivity and job satisfaction
- Multiple apps to manage the different units
- Can not make complete sense of the bits of information across the different apps.
Richard Hassan - CEO XDM Logistics
35 years Manager Reports to board
“I like to anticipate events and cater for them”
Richard is a fellow of the Association of Supply Chain Managers. He is a trained mechanical engineer with a masters in supply chain and logistics management from the University of Calgary. He has about a decade of experience in the field.
- Anticipate events through activity insights
- Manage all departments’ activities
- Bulky data
- Time lost to data entry and transfer
Opara Kingsley - COO Cippa Finance
28 years Manager Manage growth strategies
“A good business is built on a system that has the least friction”
Opara runs the operation for Cippa Finance, a fintech startup in Lagos, Nigeria. He ensures that all activities run smoothly and provides a monthly report to the founder/CEO to advise on the next set of strategies for the company to maximise its resources and improve its revenue. Cippa is working to raise funds for its Series A to expand to two more countries in West Africa.
- To develop reports as across departments
- Create effective strategies through generated reports
- Countless app tracking to draw business insights
Lydia Cardoso - People & Culture leader, Taikist
27 years Manager People Management
“Richard Branson hasn’t been wrong so far, taking care of people can improve productivity and overall business performance”
Lydia is the “YOLO” (You Only Live Once) advocate. She is a firm believer in doing your best work while living your best life. Her goal is to drive growth for businesses by developing people friendly work culture, she is a strong advocate for inclusive organisation design. Lydia hopes to fulfil her dream of getting an MBA from Insead and establish a travel agency that helps middle income earners enjoy adventures around the globe.
- Manage and track employee performance
- Improve team communication & policy transparency
- Lack of transparency
- Misinformation among employees
User flow chart
The user flow chart or flowchart helps us understand the user journey and how to help them achieve their goals through the best path and in the best time possible. To develop this, we adopted the guiding questions developed by optimizely:
- What is the user trying to accomplish?
- What is important to the user and what will give them confidence to continue?
- What additional information will the user need to accomplish the task?
- What are the user’s hesitations or barriers to accomplishing the task?
- Sketching user journeys and flow charts
Key Insights
- Employee onboarding was deemed as the building block of the application - it collects all “people” data that can be shared across other applications within the suite.
- The HR will be the anchor for many of the apps
- Some operations, especially accounting are robust enough to be used individually but can be plugged into data from other apps.
Visual Design
We started the visual design process with low fidelity or wireframing designs to help us achieve the ideal information architecture. Establishing a clear hierarchy of information would enable ease of navigation for the users to perform tasks optimally. We also defined the visual style guides for consistency across the apps
Our guiding questions:
Should we design mobile first?
Did we need a design system right now?
How do we manage scaling as the team grows?
What was our visual design language?
We moved on with the following:
Built a style guide as a priority. This would be the foundation for the design system (in development)
Proceeded with a responsive web design for primary admin actions.
The Human Resource App would serve as the anchor for the other apps.
Onboarding
Quick SignUp and Business Creation
Here, we required a way to collect signup and business information quickly without churning.
Use case 1
We released the first set of onboarding in alpha, we realised that over 70% of testers who signed up didn’t create a business account.
Further testing revealed two things could be reponsible:
- Multi-step and complex registration process
- Lack of clear communication.
Users churn when they do not verify details. This makes it difficult to provide the necessary support for successful onboarding.
Users churn when they do not verify details. This makes it difficult to provide the necessary support for successful onboarding.
Reviewed Usecase
Focus group research and further testing of the onboarding process revealed that the length of the form was the most probable root cause.
Our Proposition:
We prioritized information required for onboarding and moved other information to be completed
in-app.
We shortened the journey here. This way we can establish they’re actual business and follow up appropriately.
Result
- Over 60% increase in business creation.
Hi Resolution Mockups
The HR App
The Human Resource module is designed to manage all people operations across the company.
Dashboard
Get insight into activities across the organization, your people, departments and other distribution.
Reach your people
View profiles across departments and learn more about their roles, assign assets, share docs and more.
Track work mode and activities
Know who’s in, out, working remotely or physically in one glance.
Time off
Create leave policies, add period and assign to groups or individuals.
The Human Resource module is designed to manage all people operations across the company.
Dashboard
Get insight into activities across the organization, your people, departments and other distribution.
Reach your people
View profiles across departments and learn more about their roles, assign assets, share docs and more.
Track work mode and activities
Know who’s in, out, working remotely or physically in one glance.
Track work activities and assign benefits
Know who’s in, out in one glance. Create assign benefits to your people.
Time off
Create leave policies, add period and assign to groups or individuals.
Payroll App
This application was designed to plug iin directly to the HR module. At onboarding, employess are automatically added to the payroll database for the payroll officer to process in the future.
Insights
Get insight into activities across the organization, your people, departments and other distribution.
Generate Payslips
Employees’ payslips are automatically generated at every set cycle. Admin can restrict employees’ access to slips
Automate Payroll
View profiles across departments and learn more about their roles, assign assets, share docs and more.
Time off
Create leave policies, add period and assign to groups or individuals.
Insights
Get insight into activities across the organization, your people, departments and other distribution.
Generate Payslips
Employees’ payslips are automatically generated at every set cycle. Admin can restrict employees’ access to slips
Automate Payroll
View profiles across departments and learn more about their roles, assign assets, share docs and more.
Time off
Create leave policies, add period and assign to groups or individuals.
Asset Managment
The asset management application is built to cater for most equipment types used by employees. You can create asset types, track all assets under repair, in the warehouse or with an employee and record maintenance.
Organize Assets
Create asset types, add assets and view asset status across departments or the entire organisation.
Organize Assets
Create asset types, add assets and view asset status across departments or the entire organisation.
Track Assets
View unassigned and asssigned assets, know who’s with what and reassign assets with a few clicks.
Assign Assets
Assign and reassign assets easily from your HR app either while onboarding or after.
Assign Assets
Assign and reassign assets easily from your HR app either while onboarding or after.
Track Assets
View unassigned and asssigned assets, know who’s with what and reassign assets with a few clicks.
Vehicle Managment
Medium scale businesses own fleet of vehicles for different purpose - for senior managers, to manage logistics and delivery to clients or for runniing daily activities. This app enables them maintain the vehicles in the best shape.
Vehicle overview
Users get quick insights into the different vehicles within the organisation.
Track Maintenance
The app permits users to input records and notifies the stakeholders about important maintenance as scheduled.
Assign Vehicles
Vehicles can be assigned from the vehicle management app or while onboarding.
Updated Documents
All paperworks can be attached to the respective vehicles, leading to less clutter.
Vehicle overview
Users get quick insights into the different vehicles within the organisation.
Assign Vehicles
Vehicles can be assigned from the vehicle management app or while onboarding.
Track Maintenance
The app permits users to input records and notifies the stakeholders about important maintenance as scheduled.
A mobile first employee self-service platform to access company HR & Operations.
Clock In
This is the time and attendance feature that tracks employee work time and gives further insight to managers.
Request time off
Employees can skip long boring mails to make leave requests in few clicks. All that’s required is to indicate request duration, leave type for approval.
Clock In
This is the time and attendance feature that tracks employee work time and gives further insight to managers.
Request time off
Employees can skip long boring mails to make leave requests in few clicks. All that’s required is to indicate request duration, leave type for approval.
Access document
Employees can now avoid digging through layers of folders to get their employment documents and payslips. The myedge dashboard contains all their personal documents as permitted by the admin.
Teams
All information are shared across the team as approved by the manager. Team members can know who’s in and out of the office and celebrate with their team mates on their special days (Work anniversaries and birthdays).
Access document
Employees can now avoid digging through layers of folders to get their employment documents and payslips. The myedge dashboard contains all their personal documents as permitted by the admin.
Teams
All information are shared across the team as approved by the manager. Team members can know who’s in and out of the office and celebrate with their team mates on their special days (Work anniversaries and birthdays).
Lessons learnt
- Start small, scale fast
This is a suite of applications that will include up to 10 applications sharing data and insights from each other. We were tempted to build all features at the onset but soon realised it would be a costly mistake and started to prioritise. We built the anchor app (HR) and developed others along the side. We have about 4 apps fully designed waiting to be launched. - Keep testing:
We never stopped testing even after launching the apps, we added more members to the focus groups (especially professionals) to get best industry practice. This has helped us with deeper insights especially to build more reports that the users find important. - Embrace failure:
It wasn’t easy, but the senior managment team understood risks had to be taken (calculated ones). This helped us move past seeking to check all the boxes but rather to check the important boxes.
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