Transferring items between budgets
An interface to facilitate the transferring of items between budgets.
Lead Product Designer
Silicon Valley company developing tech products globally.
Axure, Keynote.
The product is an internal desktop web application tool to help financial analysts, managers and specialists to plan, approve, and track expenses of the manufacturing process of their products.
To calculate the production cost of a product, financial managers create budgets in the app with a detailed list of items needed in the manufacturing process. Each item can have up to 29 specifications, such as description, vendor, quantity, and price. Hence, this process can be time-consuming to be as accurate as possible.
In a survey held annually to collect feedback and spot potential new features, many users requested a way to transfer budget items across budgets. The users that requested this feature were Managers and Specialists responsible for budget creation e detailing. The next step was to understand the motivation and details behind the request.
I did follow-up interviews with Managers and Specialists that requested the feature to confirm and further understand their needs. Users stated that some items -already added to a budget- might not be used in the version of the product the budget is targeting. Since item creation can be time-consuming, they requested a way to transfer it to future budgets when necessary.
Depending on the moment, items in a budget might not only be filled with detailed financial data but also have comments, attachments, and other associated data that could get lost or impacted during the transaction.Another important constraint is that users can purchase items during the planning process. To do so, an amount equivalent to the items' cost must be previously approved in the budget. Therefore, to transfer items purchased, the corresponding approved amount must also be transferred (deducting it from the source budget and added to the destination budget).
My main challenge was to map all scenarios of impacts and document decisions for future implementation and testing.I worked with QAs and Developers to map the constraints and present the discovery visually to validate with stakeholders and the team.
The final result was a modal that guided users through two steps: First, the selection of the destination budget. Second, the item's impact summary on both budgets. The page also shows the list of items selected to be transferred, with any warnings or errors related to the constraints defined previously.Along with the high-fidelity prototypes, the final handoff included a list of all constraints and their corresponding treatments (error, warning and info messages) and example files with the different scenarios to support further QA testing.
My biggest challenge during this project was to understand the product's rules and constraints. To do so, I had to constantly communicate with engineers and stakeholders to confirm and align existing rules with new decisions. Being able to act as a facilitator and organize information visually in a clear way was critical for this project.
