Communication Tool | Case study
A software supporting and making a real estate projects succesfull by managing costs, revenues and workflows needs improvement.
INTRODUCTION
Users involved in project, who verify and track the invoices, have to deal with the fact, that the communication with the other employees and the update of files is missing.
At present, there is no feature letting the users to track invoice processing, what was done, what should be done in the future and how much time is left.
PROBLEM STATEMENT NO.1
A big part of the communication takes place outside the software, via email, telephone or MS Teams. It is about explaining and reporting missing data that are not available for all employees, but certainly should be available, in order to avoid delay.
USER STORIES
“As a person involved in project I want to have access to all documents and informations coming from other employees, so that I can clearly track the invoice processing.”
“As a person involved in project I want to communicate with other employees via software, in order not to lose important informations.”
PROBLEM STATEMENT NO.2
The invoice processing consists of different steps defined by the customers, this may cause delay and cost increase. As a result, the person responsible for the invoices doesn’t have a clear overview of data and deadlines.
USER STORIES
“As a person responsible for the invoices I want to track current changes, so that I can meet the deadline.”
“As a person responsible for the invoices I want to keep the deadlines and all steps transparent for all involved employees, in order to meet the deadline.”
Before I started designing the solution, I was thinking about the available and existing products that users may know and use on a daily basis.
The first program that came to my mind was Slack, which supports asynchronous and organized in channels work. Furthermore, everyone in an organization has access to the shared information.
The good example is also Jira Software that evolved over the years into work management tool. Using that tool at work, we enthused about statuses of the issues, all comments and files that could be attached to the issue. The question was... how to combine so many features into one communication tool.
I like comprehensive solutions, that is why I designed a mid-fidelity framework including features like:
- managing and tracking documents(screenshots and upload)
- taking notes
- starting and checking the number of video calls
- making “to do list”
- ticking the elements of the list
- reachability for all employees
- badges giving more clarity
The first image shows the look of a single calendar card and the figure below shows the view after clicking the edit icon in the upper right corner.
* Using a new tool can be a challenge, in order to prevent frustration, I added a tooltip on mouse hover.
To speed up the work on the project in the future, I have created a component list.
