The Product

e-Builder is a construction program management solution that manages capital program cost, schedule, and documents through a world-class workflow and business intelligence. e-Builder is a complete solution designed at its core to deliver control and reduce surprises for owners of capital program.

The Challenge

e-Builder has been around for years and while it solves several problems in the owner space, it can be challenging to navigate and control. The most important job of a user is being able to start a “process”, add the required data, and monitor the overall project's health. When our highest-profile client raised concerns that this function was behind, e-Builder decided to initiate a collaboration with them which would expedite the enhancements we were planning on making to the product. Our client put together a team of professionals in the construction industry as well as their own group of user experience designers and developers. They then provided a list of interface issues along with their suggested solutions. The challenge… all of the above.

My Role

I was responsible for the end-to-end design of this initiative. While I collaborated with my UX team for feedback or to delegate some minor audit responsibilities of the existing product, I was in charge of the research, high-fidelity designs, usability testing, delivery, and development support through analysis, refinement, and release.

“Too much scrolling”

Once our product managers gathered all of the issues and suggestions from our client, they immediately requested to implement collapsible sections to address the major concern being that the page was "overwhelming” and had “too much scrolling” in addition to other suggestions such as changing the layout and updating to our new design system and meet corporate standards.

The concern was understandable and of course, modernizing the design was a given, however, the UX team felt that we didn’t have enough information to support the accordion implementation.

We needed more information and didn’t have the time or support to perform user research to validate the concern.

The decision to implement collapsible accordion sections was out of our hands in UX.

It’s important to note that our client is well-known for their user-friendly products and arguably dominates the user experience space in general. With that said, they’re still only one of the many clients that we serve and while we were extremely excited to get the chance to collaborate with them, we still wanted to start from scratch and really understand the problems we were solving.

Understanding Processes

Our users’ day-to-day varies based on the type of work they’re assigned to or need to assign. One example would be a field worker performing an inspection. Their administrator would have created an inspection workflow that lays out steps A to B for how that inspection is started and finished and each step is likely to contain a set of input fields specific to a role.

Our users don’t only perform inspections, though. There can be hundreds of processes that range in complexity and that just means more steps in those workflows can exist.

The more steps a process has, the more fields there are to be completed. It also means more people (actors) will be involved in completing those fields in addition to referencing fields completed by prior actors.