This project was sponsored by Oracle. We worked primarily with a project manager at California College of the Arts under the guidance of our mentor.
I learned how to integrate emerging technologies such as AI and machine learning to improve efficiency, while also building user trust in the technology. This includes aligning the technology with user needs, being transparent about the evidence when providing suggestions, and giving users control over their data and interactions.
My Role
User research, concept ideation, and prototyping
PRACTICE
UI/UX Design, Usability Testing, Prototyping, Design Research
Team
Jamie Catacutan, Tara Lin, Grace Dai
Duration
5 weeks
Instructors
Apurva Shah (professor)
Kelly Bailey (Oracle)
Why are we interested?
Sponsored classes and projects are great opportunities for students to learn and practice skills with real projects. However, expensing is a tedious process that inevitably comes hand in hand. The current expensing process for CCA students happens on Workday, it was clear that the process wasn’t pleasant because of:1. Confusing business terms such as Funds, Business Unit and Cost Center on the expense report form;
2. Lack of knowledge around precisely what and how much can be expensed;
3. The stress of waiting for students’ money to be reimbursed.
These frustrations from the students side make us feel interested to explore what’s behind these problems. To better understand the process, we spoke with a project manager and two accountants. We also sent out a survey to project managers.
Understanding the Journey of the Expense Report
Based on primary research, we created a service blueprint to understand how the entire system works. The service blueprint revealed to us the journey of the expense report as it travels back and forth between different parties.
BUDGETING
Sponsor company, Program Chair, Project Lead and Project Manager will work together to determine the amount of budget that will be available for this class.
EDUCATING
Project Lead and Project Manager will communicate with the students on how to create expense report properly throughout presentations and emails
EXPENSING & AUDITING
After student submit their expense report, the report will need to be approved by Project Manager and Business Center. If they find there’s any error in the expense report, the report will be send back to the student to make changes. This causes many back and forth communication.
We identified that project manager is heavily involved throughout the entire budgeting and expensing process. Therefore, we decided to focus our design direction to: Improve the expense auditing experience for project manager.
The Project Manager’s Frustrations
After our primary research and mapping out the project manager’s journey, we uncovered a couple key areas of frustration they experience in the expense auditing process.
Our Biggest Takeaway
The Budgeting and Expensing systems are separate, leading to confusion about expensing and tedious work.
Expensing
Project managers need to manually review expense reports and cross-check fields. If PM see any errors, the report will be send back to the students to make changes, which cause a lot of back and forth communication between students and the PM to ensure all data is correct for reimbursement.
Budgeting
The complete disconnect between the budgeting and expensing processes also means that project managers need to keep track of the budget using non business-standard practices, or what they call “Shadow-budgeting”.
Pain Points Cause By The Disconnection
1. PM manually cross-checking and reviews expense reports information to match the receipt attachment
2. Project manager keeps track of the budget on the “Shadow budget,” and this needs to be manually updated as the expense reports are being approved
Kelly: “Can the system flag suspicious activities that I can’t figure out on my own just by looking at the report? “Laura: “How can I quickly and efficiently see what’s happening with the budget plan based on the reports?”Based on the feedback and our discussion, we updated project manager journey map, explaining the new flow and the level of automation at each step
How might we bridge the gap between budgeting and expensing?
We as a team brainstormed some initial ideas.
1. Managing and viewing the budget plan
2. Creating expense report templates
3. Tracking report statuses
4. Interfaces that “translate” information and business terms to different audiences
5. An automated system that cross checks expense reports and updates the budget plan
Concept Developing – Adopting Artificial intelligence
We want to utilize Artificial intelligence as a tool to automate the auditing process in three ways:
1. Predict and suggest appropriate budget plan based on existing project spending data
2. Automatically cross-check budget plan and expense reports, provide suggestions that help auditors make reliable decisions
3. Automatically reflect the approved expenses in the budget plan and suggest budget adjustment when needed
Future State Journey Map
We investigated what might be the key points of design intervention throughout the expensing journey. This future state journey map helped us better communicate with each other and build a shared understanding of our final design outcome.
FEATURE 1
Incorporating the budgeting plan in the expense auditing process
We investigated what might be the key points of design intervention throughout the expensing journey. This future state journey map helped us better communicate with each other and build a shared understanding of our final design outcome.
On the dashboard, the auditor can see…1. An overview of the budget spending and breakdown of the categories.
2. Expense reports that require special attention.
An expense report can have two outcomes:
1. Rejected – the system generates an evaluation of the reasons for why the report is invalid, and sends it back to the student for them to re-submit.
2. Approved – the report will move forward to the next step of the process (approve by accountant, and then the reimbursement will be issued to the student by accounts payable).
Negative expense report
Hovering over the tags will provide more details why the auditor should be cautious. The system will provide transparency of the reasoning behind the flagging, and decision-making.The auditor can also give feedback to the system, so the system can learn what kind of information is valuable to the auditor.
Special Cases
Bridge also identifies unusual expense reports that could actually be approved as “positive” expense reports and makes this call using information that is previously provided to the system by the auditor (e.g. previous auditing decisions, encumbered activity, memos, etc).
FEATURE 2
Reflecting the expenses in the budgeting plan overtime
Bridge will automatically update the budget overview overtime as the budget is burned and expenses are processed and approved.
Bridge will also provide suggestions for using the budget to its maximum potential, based on previous project data and auditor decisions.
Under the “Budget” section, Bridge uses all this data to flag and provide suggestions which includes individual limits, category spending, monthly spending, and encumbered costs for activities.
The auditor can also add special activities with estimated dates and encumbered costs so that Bridge will anticipate specific expense reports.
Trust Consideration
Alignment – Surfacing valuable information that is helpful and easy to understand.
Transparency – Showing clear evidence when providing suggestions so that the user can make informed decisions.
Control – Surfacing valuable information that is easy to understand in order to help with auditing decisions.
Wrap Up 💙
At the end of the class, we presented our deliverables at Oracle and received many thoughtful feedback both from the class and people from Oracle.
Learn more about the class – Design for Trust ↓↓↓
