Recurring Budgets
UX/UI Design
Overview
Project: Internship at Amazon Business
Project type: UX/UI Design
Timeline: Three months
My role: UX and UI Design, Prototyping
Tools Used: Figma
Challenge
Budget Management is a customer-facing product area that allows account admins to create and monitor employee spend at Amazon Business. Employee spend through the use of Blanket Purchase Orders, which has an assigned amount (ie. budget) that a given order cannot exceed.
However, the users are not able to make the budgets to recur on regular basis. This is a problem because creating a new budget every time period can be time consuming and a tedious experience.
Solution
Recurring budgets feature is an option that helps users make their budgets recurring and repeat on regular basics. This way the users do not have to do it manually every month and so on. The goal was to introduce recurring budgets feature to existing experience.
DESIGN PROCESS
EMPATHY
I began the process with researching what the budget management is and learning about the customers. I talked to other designers and my PM. I learned about the customers’ needs by analyzing VOC (Voice of Customers). I looked pain points, focusing on the areas users were struggling while creating BPO (Blanket Purchase Order).
“It is a very manual process to create BPOs for the same amount every single month. I would like to have a re-occurring feature where a budget can be replicated for every month of the year.”
- Sagora Senior Living
In order to create a better solution, first I needed to better understand the user and their problem. I developed Concept Map gathering all the feedback I had from the users. I looked for pattern.
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Users were not happy how time consuming is to create BPO manually every month. However, I wanted to dive even deeper what the users are feeling so I created User - Centered Canvas Design. This helped me put myself in a specific situation and learn what the users felt.
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DEFINE
PERSONA
I created a persona to always keep it mind the user while creating solutions. This deliverable served as a continuous reminder of the characteristics of the kind of users work with Budget Management experience.
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HOW MIGHT WE QUESTIONS
Having Juliette in mind it was time to start brainstorming solutions. I decided to work with HMW activity and after having wide range of solutions I narrowed down to two that my team agreed with.
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IDEATION
My day to day looking for solutions was to meet with the PM and team members to get feedback about my designs. At the beginning the goal was to show as many solutions as possible and then narrow down the ones that would benefit the users. While designing I also added annotations to my files so other stakeholders viewing my work would understand what each new feature does. This was especially very helpful for developers.
Because of the privacy I will not share all the screens I designed.
PROTOTYPE
MOCKUPS
Due the privacy I cannot share the final prototype but after meeting with the tech stockholders, my design team and PM I was able to create prototype and test it.
TEST
USABILITY TESTING
I worked with UX Researcher and we launched the prototype using unmoderated user testing. The goal was to:
Determine the usability of creating recurring budgets and observe how easily a user can complete the supplied task
Make note of any difficulties for further iteration/improvement
Collect feedback from user on ease of navigating the website
KEY FINDINGS
Overall, all the five users were able to navigate the site smoothly and complete the supplied task. Users expressed that creating budget as recurring was simple. However, two out of five users struggled with one check box. Therefore, after listening their struggle I made the experience more explicit and easier to complete.
REFLECTIONS & LOOKING AHEAD
This internship was very rewarding and a great experience to be able to work with so many talented designers at Amazon Business. Through constant feedback from my mentor and stakeholders I learned to defend my design choices and collaborate with stakeholders. I learned to own my work and that failing is a part of learning. We have to fail fast and fail often to get better! I learned about Weasel words and how to listen to customers and look for the pain points in order to learn what is the problem and how we could fix it.