Cost Management Platform

 

Project Summary

Cost managers in the construction industry often need to perform benchmarking tasks to estimate the cost of a construction project, which are manual and heavily depend on the level of expertise.

Furthermore, despite accumulating substantial volumes of data over the years, many companies within the industry struggle to fully utilise the potential of these data resources.

We see this opportunity to offer an end-to-end and data-driven solution to those companies, to unlock the untapped value within their data repositories; reduce the manual process for cost managers and further empower informed decision-making in cost estimation within the construction sector.

 

My Role

Product Designer

Team

Project founder | Development team from agency

Skills

Discovery | User research | Research synthesising | Wireframing |Prototyping | Usability testing

Workshop | Facilitation | Communication | Client management

 

The project is protected by a Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA).

Detailed project walkthrough upon request.

I was given a product at its proof-of-concept stage and tasked to improve it

But there are so many problems

User testing | Heuristic evaluation

  • Incomplete data attributes, cause difficulties in understanding the project details

  • The system usability score (SUS) falls below the acceptance criteria

Stakeholder workshops

  • More is more mindset (everything is important)

  • Build what the customer wants

  • Wants the feature to call/work in a certain way

And

  • The current tech stack might not future-proof

  • No design documentation or existing figma file

Prioritise the problem to be solved FIRST

No.1 Kick-off workshop

The first workshop aimed to

  • Document existing knowledge

  • Create alignment on Product vision | High-level Problem | Target audience

  • Setting expectation

No.2 Scoping workshop

After reviewing the user testing for the existing product, I ran another workshop to

  • Outline the current state

  • Discussed possible features to solve the problem identified through user testing

#How might we

Design a better benchmarking experience for cost managers

Design goal

Allow users to retrieve relevant projects and gain an in-dept understanding of those project cost plans

Research

Worked with stakeholders to understand the data structure

Design

Updated the flow to prioritise and meet the need for benchmarking

Validation

Conduct user testing to validate the design changes

The new design has enhanced the following experiences within the system:

  • Quick project access: Provide an overview of all projects within the company to allow for quick access

  • Efficient data retrieval: Simplify the process of retrieving data for reference

  • Enhance flexibility in data representation: Introduced a new data table that accommodates various views

  • Simplify repetitive user flow: Consolidate the user flow for users addressing the same task

  • Allow easy navigation: Improve product information hierarchy to facilitate easy navigation

Design improvement

Learnings

Run an alignment workshop to help define the project scope, and document it down

It’s common for stakeholders/clients not working in the tech industry, to keep increasing scope and try to solve everything during the scoping and design phase. List down all the features, and prioritise them by assigning each feature a score to indicate the value of the product helps them to stay focused on the scope.

No doubt this is one of the most difficult projects I've ever done. I'm proud I have gone so far as being a sole designer.

I care too much, so I wear multiple hats. I worked as a Product Manager and Product Designer and even drew the entity relationship diagram (ERD).

No matter how many times I've tried to convince build what matters the most, I am not the decision maker.

More is more still a mindset.

Is making good use of the money a common thing when engaging the agency?

Use their language to communicate, for example, use analogy

To help increase the design efficiency, I asked my client to purchase an existing UI kit from Material UI. The analogy I used to explain was: just like building a wall, instead of mixing the cement and sand by yourself, you use the existing bricks.