🔬 Overview

A financial platform is a product that provides the capability to manage finances across the three ERPs at Superlógica. This product is designed to serve SaaS companies, real estate agencies, and condominium management companies, offering a comprehensive set of tools for managing recurring business operations.

Currently, there are two payment methods available using the Expenses tool: utilizing the Superlógica digital account or generating a bank remittance. Since the flow using the digital account is smooth and automatic, the project was focused on enhancing the experience for customers who do not have a digital account and need to generate remittances for all expenses that need to be paid.

📋 The project

Objective

Create a tool similar to another one already existing in the system where users can track all the expense files generated and entered into the system.

Status

Paused

My role

Product designer

Deadline step

30 days

Team

1 product manager

1 product designer

3 developers

🚨 Initial problem

When a user chooses to make expense payments without using the digital account, the entire process becomes very manual. It's necessary to generate payment remittances through the system and, after receiving bank returns, insert the documents into the system to settle the expenses. Currently, there is no way for the customer to track each returned file individually within the system; they need to monitor them through reports or apply filters directly on the Expenses screen.

The product manager brought up the hypothesis that this could be a problem and suggested considering the construction of a new, specific screen for tracking return files.

The project scope was initially quite narrow, focusing on only a small part of the tool.

🔎 Research and Strategy

As the tool is used by three different ERPs, I began the project by mapping the tool to identify all the business rules involved that could impact the project in the future.

Data Gathering

In collaboration with the developers, we collected usage statistics for the tool by vertical and also conducted an analysis of the data available in Zendesk and Tracksale in 2022 to understand how the tool was positively or negatively impacting these metrics.

Assinaturas

44%

Number of customers not using the tool per ERP:

Condomínios

14%

Imobiliárias

29%

Number of support tickets and comments related to expense tracking in the tool:

Analyzing the gathered data...

We understand that the expense tool hasn't been a significant factor affecting NPS, and there aren't many support tickets related to expense tracking in the tool. It was also noted that there is a significant number of customers who choose not to use the tool, especially in the Subscription vertical.

I presented the data from this analysis to the development team and the product manager, and we realized that we needed to take a step back and look at the tool as a whole, rather than focusing solely on tracking remittance files. Part of this research is also aimed at understanding the reasons behind the lack of usage.

External Research

Quantitative Survey

The purpose of this survey was to gain a broader perspective with a large number of respondents on how companies from the three verticals use the Expenses tool within the system.

Initial Results:

There were 129 responses collected in the survey, with the breakdown being 50% Condomínios, 45.3% Imobiliárias, and 22.7% Assinaturas.

62% of the respondents did not make expense payments through the ERP, and the main reasons listed were:

• Lack of knowledge of the tool (33.3%)

• Company tradition (24.4%)

• Difficulty with the system (17.9%)

The steps considered easier were related to generating the expense in the system, while the more difficult steps were associated with generating remittance files for bank submission, receiving files back from the bank, and tracking.

With this data, we started to understand that the value of our tool was not clear to the customer, and from this, two hypotheses emerged:

1. Users may have difficulty understanding how the tool works and how it can assist them in day-to-day financial management of the company.

2. Considering that most respondents were from the Condominium ERP, the existing structure in the ERP for generating remittance files for one condominium at a time could be making the customer's expense payment process slower and more challenging than it should be.

⚠️

Qualitative Research through Interviews

To gather more evidence that could make these data more reliable, I interviewed 9 customers to collect inputs that could clarify the main pain points when using the Expenses tool.

A research plan was created, and recruitment criteria were established. The goal was to interview 5 customers from each vertical, totaling 15 clients. However, due to a significant number of last-minute cancellations, we were only able to interview 9 clients.

O que aprendemos:

3. Grande parte dos clientes que não utilizam a ferramenta de despesas do sistema é porque não entendem o valor que ela entrega para o dia-a-dia e também não sabem como utilizá-la.

2. Os usuários precisam buscar os comprovantes de cada despesa individualmente de forma manual para anexar no sistema, o que acaba tomando a maior parte do tempo da rotina dos colaboradores.

1. A falta de automação na geração de remessas e processamento de retorno de pagamentos faz com que as Administradoras precisam ter uma equipe grande para cuidar do contas a pagar.

Data Triangulation

To facilitate the visualization of results, I created an affinity map, categorizing the responses by theme.

A dinâmica fez com que o time despertasse para a importância do processo de design e aplicação de pesquisa nos projetos, mostrando que com esses resultados conseguimos olhar para onde realmente importa para resolvermos a dor do nosso cliente.

💡 Oficina de cocriação

Com o resultado da pesquisa em mãos, elaborei uma dinâmica de How Might We — Como poderíamos? — que nos permitiram pensar em uma série de ideias que poderiam resolver os problemas e alinhar colaborativamente o objetivo do projeto e o que faríamos após a dinâmica.

🎯 What we did after these discoveries

To make the final research data easily accessible to the team, I applied the atomic research approach with the facts, insights, and actionable items that this whole process generated.

1. The project was deprioritized because it conflicted with the company's business objectives.

The most prominent pain point identified in the research was the lack of automation in the tool to communicate directly with the bank, which was disrupting users' routines. However, the solution to this issue would run counter to the company's business objective, which is to encourage customers to use the existing in-house solution to achieve this kind of convenience and efficiency in their day-to-day operations.

2. Improvements in usability by applying the Design System.

Apply a usability improvement study to the Expense Core during the refactoring for the Design System, taking into consideration the data gathered from the interviews.

3. Accelerate a study for the Condominium ERP to enhance the current management structure.

Study on how we could expedite the generation of remittances and processing of returns for batch payment of expenses in condominiums.

👩‍💻 Lessons Learned:

• Sometimes, the expected number of responses in quantitative research may not be achieved, but triangulating with other data can still be valuable for decision-making.

• It's essential to understand the product's business objective to avoid designing solutions that may run counter to it.

• Not all research will validate the initial hypothesis, and this doesn't mean the project failed. On the contrary, it saves hours of study and development for a solution that wouldn't address the customer's problem.

• Involving the product team in dynamics and sharing the results of the work helped them understand the importance of data and research-based work for the product.