Two sides to a form
Asset capitalization is a financial process that involves the business and finance on a monthly basis. The exchange of information was handled through a form, exchanged via email, that consistently yielded errors and recycle in the process. For the first time, research was conducted to surface pain points from both sides of the process in order to inform the process and form re-design.
Presentation documents are available upon request.
Role: Project Lead, Design Researcher, Co-Design Facilitator, UX Designer
Research across North America
While the process overall achieves the same end goal, the way each business unit and site gets there is completely unique. It varies because of the roles and the technology they use, which is site-specific. It was important for me to speak to each of the sites to capture these key details so that they could be translated to the finance analysts in Buenos Aires. Overall research was conducted with representatives from 10 sites, across 7 distinct business units. The maps shown were brought to Buenos Aires for the workshop.
While the analysts in Buenos Aires interact constantly with the business analysts at the sites, they were unaware of how different the process looked for each site. This was the first time many of them learned of the pain points the business analysts’ experienced, helping them understand the different mistakes they encountered in the forms they received for the process.
Working together
The workshop held over 3 days allowed the finance analysts team to review the current state maps per business line, complete their part of the process on maps aligning to each of the business line maps, and designing a future state process for how to handle processing the form.
Another key part of the workshop was reviewing some possible tools that could enable a centralized workflow for the process using a digital form instead of the current Excel form being exchanged via email. The forms were also examined to understand across all of the forms which fields were the same and which ones were business line specific.
Re-designing the form
This was an iterative process, including additional research to validate the fields to ensure we were bringing over what was needed for the new form design. After validating the fields, there were some design and testing cycles with the end-users to ensure they found the new design and platform easy to use to foster an easy transition.
