What We Achieved Together:
We designed the UX and UI of the application, including a comprehensive library of design components in Figma.
We utilized the format of intensive design hackathons.
We created an interactive application prototype ready for development.
How to Optimally Manage Company Equipment?
Konica Minolta contacted us to improve the UX and UI of their existing asset management application – that is, for managing company equipment. How does such an application actually work in practice?
- Companies own items/equipment, which they either store themselves or assign to employees. They need to record and transfer this equipment.
- The application handles the entire life cycle of such an item. For example, when a company orders new monitors for employees. Once the equipment arrives, the inventory manager enters it into the application. Then the monitors are given to the employees using a handover protocol.
- After some time, the employee may return the hardware because they are leaving, or because the hardware has malfunctioned and needs to be sent for repair.
- All these operations and statuses can be handled and recorded in the application.
Before we joined the project, the application could add new equipment, assign status (reserved, borrowed, etc.), and transfer equipment to employees. The client had a number of ideas for expanding the application, gathering them from discussions with IT administrators in the companies with which they tested the application and from an analysis of competing solutions.
During an Intensive Hackathon, We Designed Two Application Modules
During design hackathons, we created prototypes of some of these ideas and tested them with potential users. We created two modules:
Reservation module – employees could share items among themselves and reserve them within the application.
Coworking module – builds upon workplace reservations to provide a situational overview of who is working and from where.
Ultimately, only the ordering module made it into the implementation; after testing, we postponed the presence tracking module as it was too complex and not as in-demand by customers.
A Component Library Was Essential
After the initial hackathon, the client invited us for long-term cooperation, during which we finalized the hackathon designs and prepared them for handover to the developers. Our goal was to eliminate obvious usability errors, unify the UI, create a component library in Figma, and prepare a larger part of the application for mobile display. During the process, we also added various improvements that resulted from conversations with customers and user testing. In 6 months of consistent work, with occasional intensive hackathons, we reached a comfortable situation with a backlog reserve and a well-organized UX library.
