Flexi-Grant® Finance
User research / Interface design / UI update
Project Overview
Finance in Grant management is the most crucial stage of the workflow, payments must be accurate and delivered in a timely manner. This project involved updating the payment grid to accommodate organisations and their workflows through extensive research and prototyping, to create an experience that met the different needs of user groups using the table.
The Problem
Flexi-Grant® finance displays all payment information about awards. It contains a payment table that holds a record of scheduled, authorised and paid payments for an individual award. I was asked to research the value of the information displayed in the table to understand if we could reduce the amount of columns.
Remote user walkthrough session
Setting the scene
Context
Flexi-Grant® is a B2B that has a number of customers with different organisation types, ranging from Council to Enterprise businesses. In the Grant management world, the workflow of a grant has not yet been streamlined to a 'best practise' that all organisations use. Therefore workflows are varied, and what one organisation deems important another will find serves no value and is ignored.
This presented a challenge, how do I reduce the number of columns on a table when, depending on the organisation, I have different needs of what information the table displays?
The Process
Research
The problems discussed were the outcome of a number of surveys, interviews and observations. First, a survey was published to capture data on the types of organisations that used this table, how often they used it, the workflow of processing payments and what information they found important/was any information missing that would be valuable to have in addition.
A number of remote interviews and user walkthroughs were then held to gather more information about the processing of payments for awards, for a deeper level of understanding the journey from scheduling payments or receiving invoices, to processing payments which could then be documented.
Kano analysis was used to determine the customer need on each column on the table. The results showed three key performers, the Payment Reference, Description, and Date paid. It became clear the date paid was something the table seemed to be missing for a lot of users and was valuable to them to have visibility of. There were also many indifferences to a number of columns, which was a result of differing organisation workflows based on sector.
Survey results
Kano analysis results
Invoicing user journey map
The Idea
Wireframing & Prototyping
From the research it was clear the table needed to provide different needs for different users based on their role in the payment process and the sector their organisation was in.
Researching how others handled similar problems and sketching ideas, a concept was formed. The idea was to be able to customise the table view based on the user preferences, which could be set by the user selecting columns they wanted and needed the table to display.
The third party plug in we used for these tables also provided extra functionality, such as being able to group information using the column headings. For example, group by invoice number to quickly see payment status's against each invoice.
Many sessions were held to discuss the concept, from showing basic wireframes to sharing a prototype. An observation made during the research interview process was how each journey involved the user being aware of the status of payments. In the current table, this was displayed using plain text and had no visual to quickly differentiate the different status of payments. Therefore I proposed colour coding the status's to allow users to acknowledge the status of awards at a glance, the idea was received well - as it was something they didn't realise would be so useful to them.
Implementation
The final result
Working with users and their feedback from sessions, we made some final adjustments such as language and status colour associations, and ensuring that when preferences were selected they were saved against the user account. This would mean that when the user would view multiple awards during their workflow they would not need to set the table each time, which would be a poor experience and cost users valuable time.
The final version was released in 2020 and has had no complaints since!
Information has been censored due to GDPR
