An excellent area for process optimisation and automation? Surely, accounting document flow in a company is a great candidate. This was the reason for creating the Bookkeeping Assistant app, designed to streamline billing and invoicing processes of our customers.
The purpose of the project was clear right from the beginning – to streamline the work of associates involved in the invoicing process of a large corporation by limiting their engagement, and consequently saving their time. How? By using Camunda BPM for workflow optimization and automation of the decision-making process. Simple, isn’t it? Well, once again the devil was in the detail.
We provided our input right at the very beginning – by collecting requirements from key stakeholders, creating the main personas (a member of the Business Delivery Team and an Accountant), and by cooperating with Camunda experts to create flows taking into consideration both user needs and the key business goal, i.e. to use a BPM platform. At this stage, we also had to consider technical requirements and limitations coming from the fact that the solution had to be integrated with external systems.
Knowledge acquired at this stage allowed us to prepare initial UX mockups – at first paper ones, which were then transformed into a clickable prototype in Adobe XD.
An important assumption of the project was to enable agile development of the product, so that with each subsequent sprint the client was provided with real value. Therefore, the UX/UI design and development processes were conducted in parallel. Instead of designing a complete prototype at the beginning, we split the processes for the main personas onto smaller stages, and then we created mockups, conducted tests with actual users, implemented key changes, and submitted them for deployment. While we were designing the next step, the app was being developed by the dev team. Every completed stage was verified in terms of compliance with the mockups and correct operation.
The established iterativeness allowed us to quickly develop the product and simultaneously optimise the manufacturing process.
To be able to deliver an operational app as quickly as possible, we decided to use a readymade component library called Angular Material together with a basic style guide prepared by the UI Designer. Thanks to that, developers didn’t need a graphical layout of each screen of the app. Instead, they could create views based on hi-fi mockups and selected styles.
Thanks to the agile approach and close cooperation between designers and developers, we were able to release an operational MVP version of the app after 3 months.
One of our tasks was to prepare a refined graphic design 2.0, which was meant to be deployed at a later stage of product development. What’s more, the UX mockups included solutions prepared for subsequent deployments to enable progressive optimisation and automation of the Bookkeeping Assistant app.
This meant that on top of quickly receiving an operational app, the client was also provided with a clear direction for product development.
