User Experience vs Users’ Experience

A goal in the workflow engineering of the payables process is delivering an efficient, effective user experience for everyone.  That means the experience is unique to the functional role; not the same for everyone.

Roles and Tasks in the Payables Process

There are several people from the Payables Community who are part of the payables process.  At a minimum, there is one person from the seller and one from the buyer.  Typically, there are others on both the seller and buyer side involved.

Regardless of how many people, each plays a different role in the process, each with a set of tasks to accomplish.

For example, a role on the seller side is to review the payable before sending to the buyer to ensure it has the correct items, at the correct price and terms.  On the buyer side, a role to review the tax related issues in the payable.  Yet another for the buyer is to ensure the prices the seller charge match the agreed prices in an associated purchase order, or procurement contract.

While some of the tasks between the roles are similar, many of the tasks are unique to its associated role.  The uniqueness of theses tasks often requires a different perspective of the information found within a payable.

Considering the examples, the person who is reviewing tax related issues in the payables needs different information than the person reviewing pricing, which is entirely different than the person on the buyer side ensuring the payable is correct.

Paper Ensures a Bad Experience

Among the challenges of paper-based payables or paper equivalents such as PDF files, is every person in the payables process is using the same piece of paper; they have the same user experience.  This means the payable, in its one and only view of information, must include the information that covers every role and task.  It must also be organize using a “lowest common denominator” approach.

The result is everyone must filter through the same information in the payable to find the portion that is relevant to his or her tasks. Most times the pertinent data is a fraction of what’s included on the paper.  Often, people must reorganize the information so that it aligns with their tasks.

The consequence is a bad user experience for nearly everyone since at best, the paper version can only represent the data efficiently for one user role.

Human Centered Design to the Rescue

Delivering a great user experience begins with applying the principals of Workflow Engineering.  In particular, applying the practices found in Human Centered Design to design great user experiences.

Here, Workflow Engineers consider each person in the payables process, and evaluates his or her tasks to complete.  Using the practice of Human Centered Design, they design user experiences optimized for every task.   These designs allow improvements both in efficiency and effectiveness by the people performing them.  While there may be some similarities, each role’s user experience will be unique to the role because its design is optimized for the role’s tasks.

Eliminating Paper

While Workflow Engineering and Human Centered Design are the beginning, the ending to delivering a great user experience for everyone requires eliminating paper.

Delivering a great user experience for everyone requires providing each role a user experience optimized for that purpose.  Each role is unique so it’s not possible to deliver a different user experience for each role when everyone in the payables process is using the same piece of paper!

Move Data — Not Paper

The way to eliminate paper is to move only the payable’s data through the process, and have computer applications render this data.  Armed with the optimized, human centered design for a role, these applications can render the payable’s data displaying only the data relevant to the role, and organized in fashion optimized for the role’s tasks.

The Networked Business Takes Shape

The idea of human centered design is new to the Payables Community.  Unfortunately, most computer applications don’t use this approach.  Instead, they render a payable mimicking a traditional paper metaphor. They deliver the same user experience to everyone in the payables process.

Computer applications that deliver user experiences with human centered design are a key part of the Networked Business.  Over the next several years, I expect to see ever more examples of computer applications that apply these principals.