A ground-up redesign of the City of Boston Procurement Department's internal finance tool, helping finance staff across all 40+ City of Boston departments manage their contracts and spending.
Qualitative + Quantitative UX Research
UX Design
Finance Services Design
Paid 10-week Internship
01 Introduction
Currently, the City of Boston has no unified, easy to use tool for finance staff to view, analyze, and manage their departments’ contracts and spending.
The City of Boston has over 40 different departments with a variety of responsibilities, from the Department of Streets making sure the city's roads are clear of snow in the winter to the Mayor's Office of Arts and Culture commissioning local painters and sculptors for public art. Regardless of their role, all departments have Administrative and Finance (A&F) staff that handle procurement, grants, contracts, and all monetary issues. These are our stakeholders.
Existing Solutions
A&F staff must keep track of when contracts need to be renewed, when spending limits are being reached, what vendors to choose, and so much more. The central source of all this information is held in BAIS FN, a database management software first introduced to Boston in the 90s. BAIS, while reliable and safe, is extremely difficult to use, being only friendly to technical users, whom A&F staff are often not.
How might we automate and unify this flow into one easy to use tool that addresses as many A&F needs as possible?
02 Research
The Spend and Award Dashboard
My team wasn't the first at the City of Boston to recognize the immense need for an internal finance tool. My mentor, Ryan Nicoll, had started this project by repurposing the CoB's Spend and Award Dashboard, initially developed to provide metrics about the City's supplier diversity and efforts to procure goods and services from small, minority owned, veteran owned, and woman owned businesses. However, after conducting a UI and UX design audit and two usability studies, it was clear to me that the dashboard, while capable, needed to be redesigned from the ground up in order to be as easy to use as possible.
Identiftying User Needs
As the sole UX researcher on this project, I got the opportunity to design and conduct an in-depth study into the needs and habits of Boston finance staff. We conducted eleven hour-long interviews with finance staff from 10 unique departments. We decided to cluster our questions in to five buckets in order to make sure we were able to discern as much as possible from each interviewee.
Eleven hours of interviews understandably generated a massive, massive amount of data. I went through each transcript and coded different themes and re-occurances, organizing my findings using Figma Jam. From here, I was able to discern the themes, goals, and pain points for each theme.
Competitive Analysis
In addition to interviews, I conducted a thorough competitive analysis of the existing spreadsheets that the various departments we interviewed constructed for themselves. I noted the features each spreadsheet had, and used this data to discern which features were most popular amongst the staff. It's important to note that although some of the spreadsheets were very high-fidelity, they all had to be manually updated, an immense labor undertaking that we aimed to fix through our automated dashboard.
Research Presentation
The user research portion of this project constituted about 60% of the total work, and was intentionally open in order to generate lots of data for the CoB to use to improve all finance processes, even beyond the scope of this dashboard. As such, I was given the opportunity to present my findings in depth to the entire Procurement Department, including the City of Boston's Director of Procurement. The entire presentation can be accessed here.
03 Design
The Solution
After synthesizing my user research findings, we moved on to the final stage of the project: the design proposal. We first aimed to simplify the user flows we first identified during the usability study of the existing dashboard, incorporating our competitive analysis and interview findings to decide what pages would be the most useful for A&F staff.
