🔬 Overview

"Assinaturas" is a product from Superlógica focused on serving SaaS companies and condominium management companies. It provides a complete range of tools for managing recurring business operations. The Invoicing feature in the Assinaturas ERP allows customers to generate invoices directly through the platform and transmit them to municipalities to make the document valid. Invoices can be generated manually or from the creation and settlement of charges within the system.

Objectives of the ERP Assinaturas product for the year:

Ensure the efficient and continuous maintenance of the ERP, aiming to maximize its performance.

📋 The project

Product objective:

Improve the operational efficiency of the Notas Fiscais tool

In addition to the main objective, the following secondary objectives were also planned:

• Implement the new Design System

• Identify and implement usability improvements in the interface

Project status

In progress

My role

Product designer

Deadline set

45 days

Team

1 product manager

1 product designer

3 developer

The applied design process

🚨 Problem

The user took hours to complete a single issuance process. During the data collection process, I had conversations with key individuals, such as the Customer Success and Implementation teams, who provided an overview of problems reported to them by users. We also noticed that in 2021, over 2700 support tickets were opened on Zendesk, which is a concerning number when compared to other tools in the system.

🔎 Research and Strategy

With the inputs from the initial data, I conducted qualitative research through interviews with customers to better understand this problematic area.

What we learned:

1️⃣ Slowness in the transmission process:

Companies used to spend the entire day issuing invoices. Direct communication with the municipality makes the process slow because it depends on how each municipality's system is operating individually.

"As we issue a lot of invoices, we need to dedicate a computer solely for transmitting invoices because we can't work while the process is ongoing, and it's also a process that takes the entire day, and sometimes it even goes into the early hours of the morning."

2️⃣ Lack of understanding of the tool:

Users couldn't comprehend how the tool works, the steps in the workflow, and the status of the invoices. The screen didn't communicate to the user about the progress of the invoice transmission process.

"We had a lot of difficulty with the tool initially. We couldn't distinguish the difference between the two buttons on the screen, what each of them meant. I thought that when the invoice appeared there, it was already valid, but in reality, it wasn't. This caused me a lot of confusion in the beginning."

3️⃣ Difficulty in integrating municipality data:

They can't understand how the data registration works and what is needed to transmit the invoices.

"We rely a lot on the person who implemented the system for us; I couldn't understand the data required for the system to issue invoices for my company. My Customer Success (CS) team also helped me a lot with this registration; fortunately, I could count on them to complete it."

💡 Ideation and Prioritization

To build trust with business stakeholders and developers, I presented the collected data to the team, and then we collaborated on the impact and effort matrix. We were able to define what would be prioritized:

Implementing a new technology in partnership with an external company that would facilitate communication with the municipalities, thus speeding up the process..

We had already considered the possibility of implementing this technology, and when we analyzed the research results, we realized that it made sense to prioritize it before the other items.

Refactoring the screen with the Design System, applying usability improvements based on the research results, as well as heuristic analysis, and reducing the steps in the workflow to make it more linear.

Creating a guided onboarding process for the tool, indicating the initial steps and configurations to ensure the system operates at 100% efficiency. This onboarding process will be implemented after the product is fully integrated with the Design System.

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✏️ Hypothesis for the solution

The implementation of the technology was placed in the developers' pipeline for the following quarter. The screen refactoring in the design system started afterward, with low-fidelity wireframes to discuss feasibility and technical constraints with the team involved.

Interface and prototype

Handoff documentation

⚠️ During the time spent working on this project, I had to be reassigned to another project with higher priority. This required moving this step forward before usability testing because we couldn't be certain if we would return in time for the project before implementation.

📊 Impact

With only 1/3 of the project implemented, these were the initial results:

Reduction in

-41%

support tickets

Process

90%

faster

And in addition, we achieved:

• Insights for improvements to the Design System through usability testing

• Changing the team's perspective on design

• Demonstrating the importance of data-driven work

🧪 Next steps

New Usability Tests: After corrections in the Design System, test again. This is crucial to ensure a more accurate delivery.

Monitoring: Integrate analytics, enabling detailed analysis of user interactions with our tool based on metrics.

👩‍💻 Insights and Lessons Learned

• Handoff begins well before handing over documents to the developer.

• Despite the tight deadline and the limited number of interviews, triangulation with other data allowed us to move forward with the project more accurately.

• Detailed documentation is crucial in projects with many business rules, ensuring clarity, consistency, and facilitating maintenance.