Designing a product is never a stand alone process, a good design decision is a decision supported by everyone. In order to build the right things, we ought to find the right problem and solution hollistically and then we divide the design process into 3 parts : functionality - usability - comfortability, we only use 3 UX ladder because the 4th ( delightful ) and the 5th (meaningful) would need further data after the product is launched.

Before mapping all user's need, we started from our primary users : the employee. We did a foundational research by interviewing 5 employee who frequently request for business trip and the office management team to find out their context and correlate it with their overall experience in requesting for business trip and here's what we found :

Using Bain & Company's 30 elements of value, we'll be able to have a more concrete form of what better experience looks like for our users. So if the users had headache because of existing process, then this element of value will be the ingredients of painkillers we're going to prescribe them later.

After gathering the pain points and possible opportunities for new system, we map out the problem and categorise it to value elements to create principles for our solution. Meaning, our solution later need to have at least these values or more. I created a simple format to help me and the team transform problem into possible value.

Example :

The problem itself is more of process summary that users been having problem with. I use my own judgement as designers to identify which value was absent from a certain process. Of course, doing this to all problem, would've created a long list, and there's also possibilities one problem solved can create more than one value. Therefore I map out the correlation between the problem and the value in a more comprehensive mapping. Other than helping us seeing a more concrete form of value, this method should help us to keep in the right direction and always be problem oriented.

This value mapping surely can be improved and we should find a way to make it less bias at some part, but at least it can be the fundamental of our design principles later on.

Redefining budget for every employee level might need lot of time and approval and the stakeholders afraid that the project will be on hold if it takes time too long to create new policy. So we decided on things we can control and we rework the flow a little bit and they agree to have an automatic realtime booking process with third party partners if employee request and already approved by lead.

From the in-depth interview, value mapping, and stakeholders agreement, we then define design principles to help us create the design that actually gives value.

The problems above are the problem that's feasible to be tackled after alignment with stakeholders and engineers which leaves us with the remaining value that we can give through design. Afterwards, the value can be extracted to design principles, the sentence example will sound like this " the design will give value in reducing anxiety because it provides clear progress visibility & expectation, as well as ease at finding what the user's need. This principles help me and my team doing exploration without going out of context.

To cater use cases, I started the design from information architecture to define how many elements that should be put in one screen, afterwards I translate it into wireframe and flow to visualize the touch points and step by step task that the user need to accomplish.

After I figure out how the system should function by creating black and white wireframes, I discussed with the UI designer to colorize it as it should function. After testing it, the user's expectation about how the design works were not well maintained, but they were able to finish the task with little bit of help and explanation. This means, the design is already usable, but not optimise for independent learnability. The design in the middle might provide quick access to everything but it's still overwhelming and resulting cognitive loads instead. Therefore, in the next improvement, I reprioritise what matters and rework the interaction to be more seamless.

Structured solution ideation help the team tackle one problem at a time, because in designing a product there must've been limitation that sometimes got in the way for us to provide the best experience for users, if we handle user's expectation, stakeholders and tech limitation all at once, it would be too overwhelming and it could prevent us to solve what really matters and feasible.