Accurants is an ERP or Enterprise Resource Planning platform, which offers a full suite of business operation tools. Recently, Accurants has added Inventory & E-Commerce modules to their platform, and my team and I were tasked with doing Research & Evaluation to identify specific areas Accurants can improve their product to meet their goal of getting new users onboarded onto their platform in 30 minutes or less. For this project I conducted an initial Cognitive Walkthrough to get a sense of where certain problem areas might exist, and drafted a Research Protocol to conduct some Remote Contextual Inquiry with some participants that fit into the user group that is targeted by this newest release. After synthesizing the results of the Contextual Inquiry, I prototyped some targeted solutions in Sketch, and created an interactive presentation for the client in InVision.

Accurants outlined a few of the key tasks inherent in their onboarding process, & running those tasks through an initial Cognitive Walkthrough helped give me a better sense of where some pain points for users may arise. Creating an account was fairly straightforward, but I could could see some trouble spots arise when it came to adding inventory & editing the details of those products. A lack of Visibility & intutive Hierarchy became apparent quickly and was later confirmed with users.

My team and I used Miro to compile our observations and notes from research sessions. We then analyzed that information and hypothesized some possible solutions to some of the barriers users encountered in terms of achieving the clients goal of a smooth and rapid onboarding process. Solutions were hand sketched, and a Research Findings & Prototype Plan was drafted to guide a higher-fidelity prototype creation process.

The solution I prototyped focus squarely on streamlining the onboarding process for users. Research participants across the board had difficulty utilizing the Inventory module in the Accurants web-app. In order to meet the clients goal of a 30 minute or less process, the solution would be to incorporate a tool that would allow a bulk import of inventory data- facilitated by the use of a proprietary template that would be downloadable from the app. Many E-Commerce platforms such as Square & Amazon leverage this method. Users also found discovering the location of the inventory editing tools frustrating, so a component allowing smoother access to that functionality was added as well. The prototype was designed in Sketch and exported to InVision for interactivity.

I created a companion video, walking through my design and prototype, and relayed this to the client. The design choices I made were squarely based on feedback from folks within their target user groups. Implementing these changes will bring the client significantly closer to their goal of rapid onboarding and make the platform more a viable product, and more enjoyable experience for their users.