Case Study:
Global Consulting Costing Tool
Role
UX Designer
Duration
3 months
Overview
The Consulting Costing Tool (CCT) is a tool that enables Consulting engagement teams to cost and price projects.
UX DiscoveryUI DesignAnalysis
Context
The Consulting Costing Tool (CCT) is a tool used globally that enables Consulting engagement teams to cost and price projects.
It hosts a myriad of pain points from EY people, particularly around lack of efficiency and reliability. Our project aims to create a new web tool which will replace the existing excel tool.
Project team
Our project team consists of people from all over the world which highlights the importance of collaboration and use of agile methodologies. As the UX/UI Designer, I had to build good working relationships with all members of the team to understand requirements, business priorities as well as work with the developers and testers to implement the solution.
Project timeline
The project implementation spanned over 5 months, initially started as a APAC project and then obtained global interest.
Working with the team
Sprint Planning
We do a sprint planning at the start of each sprint to go through the user stories that will be worked on in the sprint and any blockers.
Daily Stand-up
Every day we have a stand-up where we go through one-by-one to update the team on what we’ve been working on and bring up any blockers we’ve had.
Weekly Sign Off
End of every week we have a design sign off where I go through updated designs to get approval from the product owner so that they can go into development.
Users at the core.
Who are our users?
To understand the users better, I ran a couple of workshops initially to understand more about the user persona and their current user journey. To identify gaps, pain points and opportunities to bring into the new tool.
CCT is to be used by anyone at EY for every new potential engagement. Exports of the CCT are used by busy Partners for final sign off.
These lead to a few considerations including:
As it’s a global tool, we must consider alternate languages that may be inputted.
Pain points highlighted the slow and unintuitive use of the excel tool, the web tool needs to have clear guidance of use.
Partners are busy, and unlikely to spend time looking for information. We need to organise the output in a way that is easily digestible.
How do we organise information for our users?
The use of several surveys sent out to users allowed me to gain insights on the data that is most important to them organise information in a way that supports their workflow quickly.
Using these insights, interactive workshops with global users allowed us to dive deeper into the visual hierarchy of information and get feedback on prototypes.
Iterative Design
Refining User Stories
Working closely with the BA and the developers to refine and prioritise functionalities based on user insights.
Continuous Prototyping
Developing low fidelity for testing and high fidelity wireframes for handover to development.
Weekly Stakeholder Sign Off
Weekly catch up with our key stakeholder in the US to sign off on designs.
Features highlight
Duplicate
Problem: Adding resources take a long time, and often it is repetitive.
Source: Usability Testing
Solution: Duplicate function is added to easily replicate a previously inserted resource.
This function is an enhancement that came out of the usability testing sessions with users. Many users noted that they are adding 10-20 resources, often all the details are the same but they have to add row by row. This suggestion was brought to the product owner and we landed on the decision to incorporate the duplicate function.
Customisable views
Problem: A single project may have 10s or 100s of resources. It’s hard to see a view of all the resources given the large amount of space the edit view takes up.
Source: User workshops
Solution: A list view which is a view only display of all the resources added.
From our user workshops we found that users typically add upwards of 50-100 resources per project. Due to this large number, it becomes difficult to manage and view who has been added. Thus a list view has been designed for users to easily see a more compact view which can be sorted by different columns, and to show/hide different information.
Management Summary
Problem: Partners are time poor and need to see the most important information at a quick glance.
Source: User questionnaires, User workshops
Solution: One pager information which prioritises what is most important to see.
The output of the CCT is a crucial function of the tool. Extensive research has been focused around how we prioritise and organise information on this page. Through numerous workshops and testing we identified the top figures and visualisations that can best support management decisions.
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