tekion Corp 2024
Optimising accounts payable setup architecture for better usability
Team
Product Designer (Myself)
Lead Product Designer
Product Manager
Lead Product Designer
Product Manager
My Role
Research
Information Architecture
Design
Dev handoff
Information Architecture
Design
Dev handoff
Duration
2 Months
Background & problem
When Your Accounts Payable Setup Becomes a Maze
Accounts Payable Setup involves configuring the systems and workflows that manage vendor invoices and payments, which is crucial for daily accounting as it ensures timely payments, accurate cash flow tracking, and maintains the financial controls needed for compliant operations.
Due to rapid product growth and frequent feature releases, PMs and Engineering added numerous configurations to the AP setup without Design Team input. Over time, this created a complex, overwhelming interface with poorly organised settings that lacked logical grouping.
Old Accounts Payable page with little to no grouping.
Users struggle to navigate the overwhelming, poorly organised interface, leading to confusion, and longer setup times.
Painpoint 01
Complex, ungrouped settings generate more support tickets and require additional resources for customer troubleshooting.
Painpoint 02
New users face difficulty understanding the setup process without clear guidance or intuitive workflow organisation.
Painpoint 03
Discovery
Before We Fix It,
What the Heck Are These Configurations Anyway?
I had no prior understanding of what these configurations controlled or how they impacted different areas of the product.
I collaborated with Product Managers and Subject Matter Experts to decode each setting's purpose, categorised them by their product impact, and systematically documented my findings throughout the research process.
UX Audit
Armed with Knowledge, Time to Assess the Damage
Once I understood each setting's purpose, I was better positioned to critically assess our existing setup and identify areas for improvement.
I began documenting confusing elements, compiling questions for PMs and SMEs to clarify, and capturing immediate improvement ideas for each configuration as I reviewed them.
IA 01 risked creating too many categories with only a few settings each, potentially making navigation even more fragmented.
IA 02 reduced the number of categories, but user testing revealed that some participants found these broader groupings too general, making it difficult to locate specific settings.
IA 03 hit the sweet spot by balancing the number of categories with specificity, avoiding both the fragmentation of too many narrow groups and the searchability issues of overly broad categories.
Information Architecture
Organising the Chaos into Logical Groups
With a clear understanding of each configuration and its issues identified, I began organising the settings into logical groups.
I developed 3 logical grouping approaches to test both internally with the Design team, PMs, and SMEs, as well as externally with our dealer partners to validate user understanding.
Old Workflow
New Workflow
Solutioning
Ideating the New Interface Experience
Now it was time to design the interface through extensive ideation, drawing from the pain points and improvement opportunities I had uncovered during the UX audit.
Other Enhancements
Beyond restructuring the information architecture, I focused on improving the visual design and content clarity to create a more intuitive user experience.
- Implemented a card-based design approach to create clear visual grouping of related settings.
- Established clear visual hierarchy to emphasize important content and guide user attention effectively.
- Enhanced UX copy throughout the setup to communicate more clearly with users, moving supplementary information to tooltips to reduce visual clutter.
key takeaways
This project involved countless hours of research and stakeholder discussions to untangle a complex user experience. While it's hard to capture everything I learned, here are the key insights that stood out:
User testing multiple information architecture approaches revealed that finding the right balance between category specificity and breadth requires actual user validation.
Learning 01
Taking the time to document everything during research paid off massively when it came to spotting problems and figuring out what needed fixing.
Learning 02
