AttendIt
iOS app to add attendees to an expense effortlessly!
As a Product Management Intern at Concur, I worked on solving the most reported problem- adding attendees to an expense. Our solution optimizes the existing user flow by providing options to add attendees from calendar, phone contacts or company database.
Limited details shared on this page due to the sensitive nature of information, as per the signed NDA.
Type
Team project with Concur Labs Team
Project Aspects
Product Ownership, Project Management, Full-stack Software Development, UX Design, Presentation
My Role
Product Manager (Ideation to Final Presentation)
Contributed to Ideation, UX Design, Product/Project Management and Presentation
Timeline
June - Aug 2015 (8 weeks)
The Problem
You had a productive meeting over dinner in France. Now you’re home and can’t recall how many co-workers attended and how many clients made it out to the meeting. Expense chaos.
The Solution
With AttendIt, you simply view and confirm attendees right from your iOS calendar with one tap. Instead of manually entering your report or receipts and trying to remember who came, you can quickly identify participants (or “attendees”) from your calendar event in one tap from your device. Accurate data goes to your Concur account, which double-checks for duplications, and there you have easy, instantaneous reporting.
Deliverables
We developed an iOS app called AttendIt that connects with iPhone calendar app, phone contacts and -company's database to retrieve and add attendee to an expense before reporting. I pitched the impact of this idea to the top executives at Concur and was selected as the "Best Intern, Summer 2015" for my work on this and ExpenseThis project.
Process
Brainstorming for ideas/concepts/pain points
Since, I was working on two projects simultaneously, the process followed was similar to the one for ExpenseThis project. We started by brainstorming for pain points within the current UX of Concur Mobile apps to prepare a list of ideas. Affinity diagrams were used during the process.
Data about key pain points and their impact in T&E industry
Next, I did market research to gather data and validated the user need. I interviewed executives to understand scale and scope of this painpoint within Concur.
This is third biggest painpoint reported by over 33% T&E users
I wrote the user stories and worked on information architecture and user flow design of the app.
User Story Proposal Document
Existing user flow design
New optimized AttendIt user flow design
I used personas to check for user motivations and behaviors. Also, we ran a survey with about 12 internal participants and contextually interviewed numerous others to again validate need for new user flows.
New user flow simplifies existing flow by removing features not used by most users (measured by Google Analytics). It also loads in the data from backend and appends it at the bottom of the search results list. We call this a lazy search results technique. This eradicates the need to use advanced search forever and is an improved version of quick search.
Research. Develop. Validate. Repeat.
I used envisioning cards to measure usability of this MVP and prepared test cases (golden path + edge cases) to reveal gaps in the prototype. This new experience was often compared to Facebook's add friends feature by our usability test participants. During my presentation to managers and higher executives at Concur, this is what they had to say:
“It is a big pain. This makes it so easy. Brilliant!”
Secret sauce: Pre-fetching multiple databases using contextual prioritization for a smoother experience.
Final Thoughts
The new experience is expected to save workable time of employees of our clients, resulting into savings of Millions of Dollars for the clients. This experience is expected to be shipped for iOS and Android mobile apps. During my first 8 weeks of internship, I managed product development of both ExpenseThis and AttendIt involving 5 developers and 2 designers.
I used Concur's existing product roadmaps, feature lists and internal data science to gain insights to inform my decisions. MVP building is crucial for developing a full-fledged product. This was a key takeaway.