OVERVIEW

The Challenge

Today, accountants are using Excel sheets to calculate and keep track of rates and reserves. This is a tedious, manual process that results in over 250 manual journal entries and over 600 hours of work each month. To top it off, accountants have to repeat this process every month in a 5 day crunch.

The challenge was to design an end-to-end user experience for a developing finance tool to help accountants quickly calculate rates and reserves accurately.
My goal was to design a Dashboard and Reserve experience to make accountants’ 5-day crunch easier.

The Solution

My solution was to design the main navigation, analyzation, and approval processes, for 2 major user roles called the Approver and the Preparer. This included designing the following screens:

• Dashboard

• Approval process

• Reserve List

• Reserve Details

• Calculate Reserve

• Adjustments

Conducted a total of 11 interviews with both customers (accountants and finance managers) and stakeholders (developers). Created an affinity diagram to analyze results and draw out key research points.

Also based on the interviews, I created a customer journey map in order to understand the current experience accountants go through today in calculating reserves and rates using manual Excel sheets.

KEY FINDINGS

From the Affinity Diagram and the Customer Journey Map, I found the following key research points:

• Manual process through Excel sheet

• “Half the job is how do I build a smarter Excel file”

• 40 different known reserves

  • 90+ Journal entries for 3 team members

  • 12 regions x 30 min = 6 hours of work

• Inability to understand current status of reserve

• Inability to communicate with product owners because of lack of granularity in Excel

These research points helped me create Design Goals to help guide the overall design direction for the new finance tool.

In my research, I also came across 2 major user roles that would be using the finance tool the most: Approvers and Preparers. Preparers are Financial Analysts who are actively analyzing and calculating reserves, and need approval from Approvers before successfully posting a reserve to the general ledger.

Approvers are Senior Accounting Managers who need to be able to monitor a wider set of reserves, monitor any Preparer’s underneath them, and crucially review and approve any submitted reserves before posting. Based on this information, I was able to create two main personas below:

Preparer: James Young

Job title: Financial Analyst
Responsibilities: Calculate reserves, responsible for presenting to stakeholders about calculations, responsible for Brazil and Japan reserves.

My Role: UX Design Intern

Duration: 12 weeks

Tools: Pen, paper, SketchApp, Invision

My Artifacts: Affinity Diagram, Customer Journey Map, Storyboard, User flows, Sketches, Low-Fi mockups, High-fi mockups, Digital Prototype

Team: Worked under the guidance of a Manager and a mentor, and worked closely with the development team (~8 individuals)

Approver: Annie Robinson

Job title: Accounting Manager
Responsibilities: Oversee James’ work, review and approve reserve calculations, responsible for western Pacific countries’ reserves.

User Flows

After understanding the problem space and defining my personas, I started crafting a solution by first creating user flows to understand how the new finance tool can improve my customers’ processes.

In particular, this is a pair of user flows that studies the Preparer’s decision-making process. The user flow on the left reflects decisions when using the manual Excel sheets to calculate reserves. On the right, is the same Preparer’s flow but with the finance tool automating the first three steps. Having the first 3 steps automated frees the user to spend more time analyzing the numbers, rather than wasting time doing the pre-calculations.

Sketching

After understanding what the new finance tool can do to improve on accountant’s processes, I started sketching different wireframes for what the interface would look like. Below is a series of sketches I created imagining what key screens would look like, such as the Dashboard and the Reserve screens.

Sketches of Dashboard screen

Early Wireframes

After sketching out rough ideas, I created some initial wireframes using Sketch. Below are some of the early wireframes I designed, the dashboard, reserve navigation and the reserve details screen.

After refining some of these initial wireframes, I created a digital prototype using Invision. This digital prototype mimicked how the program would work in real-life, and it served as a tool in my usability tests with customers.

Usability Tests

After creating the high-fidelity mockups and an interactive digital prototype, I conducted 2 rounds of task-oriented Usability tests. These test focused on the Preparer’s & Approver’s user experience by testing the navigation and approver’s workflow.

In total, I was able to recruit 11 Participants in total, ranging from Financial Analysts to Senior Accounting Managers, customers who would be directly using the finance tool on a monthly bases. Participants ranged from 4 different Reserve Divisions from within Amazon, and some were located in other geographical areas including London, Beijing and Cork.  

Usability tests lasted around 1 hour for each participant.

Iterations

After collecting resulting data from each usability test, I analyzed user responses to understand what alterations or changes I should make to the product. Below are a series of images that show design iterations/changes I made based on customer feedback. “Before” images are outlined in red, and “After” are marked in green.

Overview Graphic

This feature was designed to give users a “lay-of-the-land” approach to all reserves across the company. It’s purpose was to give users an illustrative/visual way to capture the statuses of all reserves at once.

When tested, customers expressed their desire for the graphic to be “dynamic” - be action-oriented and clickable to see all individual reserves listed under a specific status-category.

I edited this feature to create a list of reserves that would appear on the bottom depending on what status button was clicked, giving customers an “overall picture.”

After consolidating data points from the usability tests, and going through some design iterations, I was able to incorporate all my customer feedback into a final mock-up design. Below is a sample of some of the final designs I created:

Final Design - Preparer Role

Screens showing the Preparer navigating to the correct reserve, making adjustments, and finally submitting the reserve for approval with a comment.

Final Design - Approver Role

Screens showing the Approver’s approval process.

New Feature Survey

During my usability tests, my customers gave me great new feature suggestions for the next design iteration for the finance tool. I received the following innovative suggestions:

• Parallel Approvers, switching approvers

• Flagging in Reserve Overview

• Auto-scheduling, bulk refresh actions

• Reserve Overview page

• Information on Cards (status, code #)

I took these suggestions and created a “New Feature Survey,” and handed these sheets out to both my customers and development team, in order to prioritize which features to implement in the next design phase.

The survey allowed stakeholders to evaluate each feature on a scale of 1 - 5 for cost (how much will it take to implement?) and impact to the user (how useful is it to our customer?).

Based on the feedback from my stakeholders, I was able to steer the direction of the project by ranking which feature was most important to develop first.

Next Steps:

As my internship neared its end, I decided to brainstorm future design considerations for the product to leave behind after my departure. While a lot of the core interactions were designed, there were plenty of ways this tool could be further refined in the future. My suggestions for the next stage of design iterations included the following: 

• When does a user know that a Reserve is
  “ready for review?”

• Reserve “Overview” Page 

• Approver privilege settings

• New Feature List (from above survey)

• Executive Approver, Configurator user roles

• Adjustments for other accounting teams

• Investigate Sum of Adjustments Summary

• Investigate Credit/Debit Lines 

• Investigate further on “History” tab

  • History of prior refreshes

  • History of posted reserves

My time at Amazon’s Finance Technology was an amazing experience, I learned so much in such a short amount of time. Here are some key takeaways that I learned:

Scalability: Creating designs that are scalable for larger number of users. This is an important quality to keep in mind as a designer because at many companies like Amazon —where their customer base is in the millions— scalability is a big issue in being able to properly serve your customer base.

Reusability: It is incredibly important to design elements that can easily be reused or repurposed. This can help so much in reducing workloads and in increasing productivity. It can also create familiar patterns for users that require less time to adjust.

Leading and advocating for the UX vision: The most important thing I learned is to get your stakeholders’ buy in. Communicating and educating your stakeholders about user needs helps them understand the reasoning behind the design decisions you made, and your stakeholders will begin to understand the importance of UX.

I also learned that User Experience Design CAN influence the direction of an entire project. Towards the end of my internship, I was able to influence the project’s heading with my “New Feature Survey.” By prioritizing which features were the most important the user, I was able to provide a mini “road map” for the developers and help define what shape the Amazon tool would take.