For a more detailed case study, please reach out.
DIGITALIZING THE CONSTRUCTION INDUSTRY
As Lead Product Designer at Compa, I revolutionized their construction solutions software within a year, evolving it from a basic invoice management tool to a comprehensive platform. Architects can now seamlessly manage project costs, communicate with stakeholders, and streamline invoicing from project inception to completion.
Compa is a start-up that provides construction solutions. Their software helps architects manage project costs, communicate with customers and stakeholders, and organize and send out invoices. I joined Compa early on as one of the very first hires to shape their product, find product-market fit, and improve the overall design. When I joined the company, the product was only an invoice management tool that allowed architects to upload and approve invoices.
I transformed the platform into sophisticated software that architects can use from the initial project phase to the final step of sending out invoices. The software allows architects to plan their costs by creating budgets and a bill of quantities, manage all costs in the cost tracking tool, upload documents, receive, approve, and send out invoices, as well as communicate with customers and stakeholders through the internal communication tool.
Initial Situation – Invoice Management
As previously mentioned, when I joined Compa, the software provided architects with an invoice management tool, which was lacking in existing architect software. Architects could upload invoices received from stakeholders, manually review each item, make adjustments, set due dates, and ultimately approve the invoice.
Invoices were approved and then sent to customers via mail in PDF format.
Although architects found invoice management to be a useful tool, it was a minor feature in comparison to the other software they were using. It became evident that a more advanced software was necessary to provide them with greater control over payments. This is where the cost tracking tool comes into play.
Cost Tracking Tool
Before being able to design this feature according to our customers needs, it was important to understand how architects work. For this I prepared and conducted several customer interviews. Those helped me to understand that architects work with so called contracts. Each contract represents a construction project with its own construction company. A contract could for example be brickwork, roof construction, tiling or carpentry work.
Within Compa, architects needed to be able to create contracts, add all necessary contract details such as the contractor name and email address, a planned budget, agreed amount and addenda. Received invoices would then be uploaded into the corresponding contracts, rather than on a general invoice page.
With all the data that architects could add to their individual contracts as well as the invoices and all the adjustment they could add to those, we were able to design and implement a cost tracking overview, where all costs can be seen and tracked in an overview. This was a game changer for the architecture industry.
After implementing cost tracking in the platform, Compa was able to gain many new customers. With the growing numbers of users, also new feature requests came in. All of Compa’s customers were still using other software or excel sheets to plan costs, manage documents or communicate with customers. The most important feature request at that time was a budgeting tool.
Budgeting
The first phase of every construction project is budget planning. Architects usually create a spreadsheet in which they write down all positions together with the planned cost. Those sheets can be enormous considering that the construction of a house has a number of costs. As for the cost tracking tool, I again prepared and conducted user interviews, user research and customer sessions.
Firstly, I needed to understand how their current workflow looks like. Which software do they use? How does a construction budgeting look like? What are important parameters? What happens if costs change during a project phase? Those and many more questions needed to be answered. the interviews were not only conducted with Compa’s existing customers but we also recruited other architects with the intention to gain them as new users for our platform.
After conducting this extensive research, I created wireframes and clickable prototypes of the new budgeting feature. In the next round of customer sessions, I presented the first version of Compa’s budgeting tool and conducted user testing. I observed how architects used the prototypes to figure out pain points and desires. The concepts and prototypes were reiterated and retested several times until I was confident that we had created an intuitive and user friendly feature.
In close collaboration with our engineering team the budgeting tool was implemented quickly. Compa had now become a tool that architects could use from the initial project phase on. Existing customers started to use our platform more frequently and again new customers could be gained.
Document Management
Another feature request that we often received was document management. Architects usually sort their files either locally on their computer or in a cloud service. However, working in Compa and trying to find files in a different system usually wasn’t a great user experience. Thus, I designed a concept for document management which was rapidly implemented in the platform. I gathered customer feedback before hand, thus not as extensively as for the before mentioned features. We quickly realized that the document management tool wasn’t used as much as we’d hoped initially.
Once again I conducted several user interview to find out why this was the case. Biggest pain point here was that it was hard to sort the files and find the right ones for the corresponding contracts. Users asked to be able to create folder structures, just like they can on their computers. Based on the feedback, I created a more sophisticated document feature that allowed our users to link files to contracts and to invoices.
I decided not to go with the classic folder structure as I was confident that a more consistent solution would allow them to work even more efficiently. This decision was also based on the fact that each architecture office usually has several user accounts. By creating a document feature which allowed users to link documents to contracts rather than to create folder structures, prevented the creation of inconsistent folders and lead to a consistent structure and easy collaboration within the platform.
Email Communication
Before implementing an email communication feature within Compa, architects had to download their budgets, cost overviews or approved invoices as PDF and send them to their customers using their email software. Needless to say, this wasn’t the best user experience.
My user research and interviews focussed on finding out in which phases architects usually send emails, how many they usually send and if additional files needed to be attached.
As sending messages and emails through software is a state of the art technology and usually very consistent throughout platforms, there was no need to create prototypes and test those. I created different concepts and wireframes and worked closely with our engineering team to find the best solution, both for the user experience and the implementation. After a few quick iterations, the email feature was implemented.
Architects were now able to send out information on the construction costs and development through Compa directly.
Bill of Quantities
The bill of quantities (BOQ) is a list of materials and services required for construction projects. It includes quantities of both the materials and labor. The BOQ is sent out to construction companies, which add their prices, then send it back to the architects who choose the best offer.
The BOQ is an essential part of a project. Once architects were able to do all the cost calculations and invoicing through Compa, it was evident that a BOQ feature was needed. I teamed up with our founders and project manager to tackle this bis request. I included our growth team, which on a daily basis talks to our customers as well as to potential new customers. The PM and I created a questionnaire for the growth team so we could find out how architects currently create, send out and work with BOQ’s. Based on the basic information we gathered, we conducted extensive research on the topic in several user interviews and customer sessions. In the customer sessions, the architects would walk me through their current process and share all details needed to come up with our own concept.
As the BOQ is a massive feature that needs to cover a lot of functionalities and edge cases, it was challenging to find a simple, intuitive and clean solution for it. I worked on several different concepts, pitched them to our founders and PM, and finally decided to create 2 different prototypes for user testing.
After several user testing sessions and reiterations I designed a modern, simple and powerful feature. In close collaboration with the engineering team, we found solutions that will ensure a smooth user experience and clean technical implementation.
From that moment on, our users were finally able to ditch other software they used up to that point as Compa had now grown into a tool that can be used in all phases of construction projects.
Payments
In platform payments are not a necessary feature for a construction project, but one that improves the overall experience and one that makes getting paid much easier. Payments in the architecture industry are a huge pain and often delayed. To help our customers with this, we desired to implement in platform payments.
Invoices that have been approve can be paid by the architects to the construction companies through Compa directly. For a smooth experience, besides offering manual bank transfers we implemented Klarna. With only a few clicks invoices can be paid. In the invoice overview those invoices are marked as paid and the budgets are automatically updated. Before Compa, architects used online banking to pay invoices and mostly excel sheets to track payments.