Invoctopus

Building

Five interns (BugBusters Team) navigating the entire Design Process without a paired guideline, luckily we had an amazing community where I, a team of designers of one, and my helpful programmers created a culture to scribble medium case studies, articles, and theories to help us find the some answers.

But there was one book that really helped me: Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days, which is why I have an article dedicated to it.

Discover

This was a product, like all AOA's product, dedicated to the US market. And there we faced our first challenge, understanding the legal and operational points of an invoice for them to figure out how to build it.

Without too many research resources, the team solved most of the questions using secondary research strategies, one that really stood out was competitive research. Understanding how people solve their problem guided us to find a way to design the right way to solve it.

Define

Competitive research being one of the methods that helped us, we were mature enough, understanding the scenario and the problem, to start generating a solution, starting with a problem statement.

Also, we now knew how to get from A to B in the invoice building helped us map out what we wanted their journey to look like, first we started with art museum sessions with everyone sharing their ideas.

Then we mixed good ideas and came up with this:

To later, reach a level like this:

Design

With flows, we could establish mandatory features in comparative assessments, where we studied competitors to combine or add mechanics to existing features in other builders, which later also helped us create a parking lot of ideas and a sense of styleguide.

Consequently, sketch those ideas into wireframes was the best way to translate the insights we had to solutions that could later be designed and code.

As I said, this gave our devs some proof of concepts to work on, while I had time to work on the prototypes, from low fidelity to a higher.

Deliver

With the proof of concept and the high-fidelity prototype designed, we were allowed to do usability testing. Finding the user was difficult, but as Steve Krug says in his book "Don’t Make Me Think" Testing one user is 100 percent better than testing none"

Proudly, our first version was released on the web. While the whole team was doing QA testing and reporting bugs, we saw three opportunities: To fix them right away, start developing new features, and commercialize the product.

Enhancing

Planning the future

By testing the products ourselves and getting more and more in touch with the financial environment we had many ideas, so the whole team contributed to a parking lot of ideas, where in figjam, we posted our ideas.

The insights were then prioritized by balancing effort and result combined with the Maslow's UX Pyramid, broken down into a roadmap and divided into small tasks that were organized into a Kanban board.

Branding

We also saw an opportunity to bring more users to our platform by marketing our "invoice builder" named "invoice builder" to a more original name, as our competitors already had their generic name, such as invoicehome, freeinvoicebuilder and invoice-generator. Therefore, we mapped naming strategies, brand values and domain offering to find a solution.

Taking the time to understand current SEO strategies and trends in the invoice building market also helped us decide in which direction to go.

So we dediced to go with Invoctopus, which allowed us to start thinking about a style guide in line with the brand guidelines we stated early

Redesigning

Applying the brand guidelines to our pages was then our priority, and we also saw an opportunity to do a Heuristic Markup, to review some of the features we had and how we displayed them. In this way, we were able to redesign and rebuild some pages at the same time, optimizing our backlog.

Aiming to improve the visibility of the system state and the similarity between the real world and the interface, but also trying to design a clearer and better mobile version. The new version was released with a new feature "Invoice history" and 5 more pages.