Designing an online ticketing platform for the company, to automatise internal communication and purchasing orders and approvals.

In the year 2015, together with the management, I was working in Miami setting up the new US branch of the Italian company I was working for. 

AGS provides maintenance, support, procurement advice, fleet management, training and latterly lease finance to the handling and catering providers at airports. This support can be at either the providers’ premises on site or a bespoke facility can be set up by AGS, therefore being capable of operating globally.

The purchase process used back in Italy was still very old school: they just stopped using fax in favor of e-mails to send requests for spare parts or services that were to be approved by the management and then sent to the Purchasing Office; the Purchasing Office then issued an order that was then to be approved again by management: only then the order could be processed and the workshops would receive the supply.

But the service to be provided in the US was much, much larger and it involved so many people. The e-mail method was almost impossible to implement in this new reality.

I had the idea to create a web-based platform that would be accessible everywhere, that would be easy to use and most of all that would automate this -in my opinion insane- process. Management agreed and so I started working part time (as I officially was the Executive Assistant) on this tool.

I worked as a UX, UI and Web designer. I performed the research and interviews in the Company to understand the real needs, formulated the concept and flows, tested with the final users. Finally, I developed the tool using Joomla and I wrote the user manuals to distribute to every function within the Company.

There were three levels of access and function:

Workshop: the workshop responsible needing spare parts or services. Needs to be able to place a request and follow its status.

Purchasing Office: receives a purchase requests and issues a purchase order that needs approval from management prior to fulfillment.

Based on this I needed three different flows to facilitate the job for each party. 

The design process included gathering insights from research and user testing, defining pain points and finally ideate a solution through sketches.

I designed the flows and then jumped right into programming.

To get insight on the app, 2 people for each segment were interviewed. Each participant was asked to complete a task while verbalizing his thoughts. Tasks involved using the search and filter options, the "Create Request" option, the status change. 

I iterated every time to correct usability problems mainly due to my assumptions during the development.

Looking back, I know that I gave the aesthetics of this tool very little importance, so what was the MVP basically remained the final product. I had no knowledge of prototyping tools at the time, in fact, I jumped into programming the tool. Of course, this took a lot more time and work on the code instead of following a more iterative process on a prototype. Still, I relied on iteration upon every suggestion from the final user. This project, even if very imperfect, taught me a lot about UX when I didn't even know that it was called UX, especially because I followed every step from ideation to development.