Vista ERP
Provides employee engagement platform for companies to increase social impact and cross-functional connections
BY SAKSHI
What this case study about?
How the discovery and UX design processes were implemented to create an innovative platform, which allows the safety managers of large organisations to develop, for desktop and mobile devices, the engagement and culture of safety at the workplace in their operational area employees, reducing costs resulted from work accidents.
VISTA ERP is an employee engagement platform for companies to increase social impact and cross-functional connections. "VISTA ERP" partners exclusively with top community organisations, personally curates relevant opportunities to employees, and handles logistics end-to-end to put together an event for the workplace.
Roles
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User Research
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Product Strategy
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UX Design
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UI Design
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Prototyping
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Usability Testing
Tools
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Invision
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Figma
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Typeform
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Photoshop
Timeline
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10 weeks
The Challenges
Transform a finished product into a new solution with a higher profit margin, more innovative compared to its competitors, and easy to present to the point of being described in an elevator pitch.
In addition, the new solution should be made only by refactoring and making the most of the existing source code, due to the investment already made in the development of version 1.0 of the ERP.
Outcome
Through working on this case study I once more took a deep dive into the work as a UX/UI designer. I went through the whole design process from start to finish and gained a lot of valuable insights.
Prep-work & Goal Setting
Scenarios and market at the time
Competitors:
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Starting to moving their platform to cloud and trying to create more intuitive UI
Companies and Clients:
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All companies, in general, were watchful for the new government platform and its requirements and cost to adapt to it
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Organizations were creating their open innovation events, with the help of accelerators to search for startups with solutions that met their processes.
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Big organizations were aware of a new international standard (ISO 45001) that was being approved
Research
UX lessons learned from the previous platform (ERP)
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UX design not properly targeted and focused only on how to make the platform more intuitive than the competitors
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Agile was not used in the discovery phase, only in the delivery phase, leaving further research and testing just in the development phase
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Research carried out with other projects that had different opportunities and challenges
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Validation of prototypes could have been performed in a leaner way and with less code, or no code at all, using only more elaborate presentations and navigable models.
With these lessons learned, we decided to do more research and avoid the design thinking process from resulting in a cascade format.
A holistic and strategic vision
Based on the scenarios and analysis of the opportunities and threats of each one of them, given the current challenge of other ERP, in repositioning itself in the market, we have outlined some actions to do the work of discovery but always respecting the flow of the board presented above.
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First actions
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Categorise customer profiles and current prospects for each type of product
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Do the new research using the desk research base but paying attention to the bias to do not compromise the new product
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Involve the development team from the beginning of the design thinking process to maintain technical viability as a key factor
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Profiles assessed
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We categorize the profiles of our customers and prospects according to the criteria, market growth, better adherence to existing solutions, and viable average tickets for each solution. Thus, we saw that we should only focus on large organizations and some medium-sized ones with risk and profile operations similar to previous ones.
Insights From Research
Validating hypotheses with analysis
We created a survey form on "Typeform" with several questions like:
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What was your biggest ERP management challenge today?
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How were you (ERP manager) solving this challenge?
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In addition to management processes, was there, or were they negotiating, any software to tackle this challenge?
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What is the budget allocated for this challenge?
We previously had other desk researches with standard information, such as company branch, number of employees, type of operation, project phase and etc …
The survey was conducted with 82 managers of large and medium-sized companies in civil construction, mining, industries, and Oil & Gas, where we identified a more specific and common pain for QHSE managers that were not treated by any software in this field. About 50 % of managers somehow pointed out the issue of safety culture and engagement as the main problem.
Mapping the best answers
Mapping the answers we found that engagement and safety culture were the main challenges:
“My biggest challenge is to make the other leaders more adherent to the management processes.”
“The biggest challenge is to ensure that safety is disseminated in a more efficient way so that it can measure the results not only based on the reduction in the number of accidents but proving with the level of safety culture of the organization.”
“My biggest challenge is to get contractors to adopt the same safety standards required by our organization.”
“The biggest challenge is to coordinate the safety actions in several units at the same time to have better visibility of the results and indicators.”
We discard very generic or poetic responses such as:
“Implement the zero accident culture.”
“Reduce the rates of accidents at work.”
“Improving the QHSE indicators”
The research was carried out through a personal visit to the managers, and an online form.
Iteration of Personas
Now we could work on each persona for this initial client’s profile.
The main persona at the beginning of the funnel was not only engineers or coordinator, but QHSE managers or directors with decision-making power to implement our solution to be developed.
Opportunities x Hypotheses
“Design thinking doesn’t need to be fancy”
Bringing the development team into the process of design thinking or, more precisely, ideation was a very important factor in gaining time with solutions that were viable. We choose a flowchart approach because the dev team was more familiarized with that tool, so was easier to iterate fast.
Wireframes
Let’s prototyping some cool stuff! 🤘
Working with data collected during the research phase, I was able to set up user flows which we reviewed with the team. After that, It was time to give shape to our product. Until here, we had around 6 week of work (including research phase).
My steps were:
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Create low-fidelity wireframes (on paper) the main objective was to create the product’s structure and define features. With the team, we had the opportunity to quickly plan and validate the value of of the design of a screen.
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Create a style guide to keep the UI consistent (colors, fonts, structure, basic components, etc)
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Create high-fidelity wireframing in this step I defined how a product will look at project completion.
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Create the prototype, before to move on with the development process we decided to make a quick prototype to validate the usability and overall value of solution design.
I used Autoflow in Figma to make the user flow visible and also converted the single screens into a clickable prototype. I was therefore able to conduct the first usability tests with volunteers while still in the wireframing stage.
High -Fidelity Wireframes
“Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” — Mike Tyson
I used the lo fi prototype to test my design and to gain some first feedback from users. In preparation for the high fidelity prototype I had a close look at the actual design of vista ERP, made some adjustments regarding font size, shapes and color and set up a component library following the 4pt rule.
Setting up components made it fast and easy for me to create a hi fi prototype with a consistent product styling.
