Purchase Orders/Budget Management

One of the most requested features from our top enterprise clients was for a robust purchase order (PO) and budget management system, both critical to the successful implementation of a remote freelance workforce. This would also support clients' growth on the platform and especially management—at scale—of multi-project spend across several cost centers and hiring managers. Phase 1 (Budget Estimator) and Phase 2 (PO Configuration) involved heavy cross-team collaboration with Solutions, Product Marketing, Legal, Visual Design, and Engineering.

Challenges:
• Burndown visibility: hiring managers did not know how much money was “left” on a PO
• Permissions settings: hiring managers picked POs off the platform they shouldn't have access to
• Fee visibility: hiring managers didn't know how large of a PO to raise because enterprise fees were hidden
• PO visibility: hiring managers did not know PO expiration date or when to issue a new PO
• PO visibility: hiring managers selected invalid POs on the platform

Design Goals:
• Streamline clients' process managing budgets and spend on Upwork (generating/managing POs)
• Build a framework for more robust client-facing PO controls, resulting in:
• Improved validity of POs being added to the platform
• Process for reminding HMs and Admins to add a PO to a new project
• Configuration of permissions and notification preferences on POs
• Visibility into newly added POs

My Contribution:
• Created storyboards to illustrate high-level vision for budget management experience, and presented to key
stakeholders and larger enterprise organization
• Designed the PO/Budget Management experience (flow diagrams, wireframes, iterating, refining, and delivering
final designs)
• Worked with Research to define user studies, conduct in-depth qualitative interviews, test, and retest designs
• Collaborated with Product Marketing and Legal to refine copy/messaging
• Worked with Visual Design to align designs with current style guide/patterns
• Tested flows in dev environment, filed bugs and delivered punch list of items to be fixed

Date: Phase 1 - February 2016, Phase 2 - June 2016
Role: Lead UX Designer

Phase I - Budget Estimator Design