Procore Custom Reporting 2.o
The Project Details.
Company
Procore Technologies
My Role
UX Designer
Team Members
Fatima Howes (PM), Sam Meyer (Lead Developer), Ramsay Strinling (BE Developer), Robbie Smith (BE Developer), Tony Dihn (FE Developer), Will Huang (FE Developer), Daniel Oh (QA), Ashir Badami (Product Marketing), & Zach Buchman (Research).
The Background.
This is a cliche term in the world of tech. But it’s a cliche for a reason. Clive Humby, a UK Mathematician first coined the phrase stating that “Data is the new oil. It’s valuable, but if unrefined it cannot really be used.” When oil is refined, it ends up becoming a foundational element of our everyday lives. To draw the similarity, we wanted Procore’s data to be integrated into the lives of our customers.
It became obvious that building and maintaining a profitable construction company in this day and age is difficult. The ability for a construction company to mitigate risk on projects and understand early warning signs that a project may require some corrective measures is now highly important to keep the company above the line. The sheer volume of information generated during a construction project is huge and hard seems very hard to manage based on data entry.
For most of our customers, we have the opportunity to be the source of truth - the central hub where all their construction information comes together to work for their benefit!
The Current Problems / Building Empathy.
The industry already suffers from large, disparate data sources that are hard to make sense of and even more difficult to unlock deep contextual insights that would not be evident otherwise. Also, the user's don't know where to begin in building a report, and some reports are very complicated to build without understanding Procore's data structure. Many of our user's give up quickly in the report building process.
Get to the Research.
Around 4 months of initial research took place. Our team travel from San Diego, CA to Charleston, SC partnering with clients from our emerging market to ENR 100 clients. Below are photos and documents from our research.
We then partnered with research & machine learning team to help gather data around what reports people have been creating. We wanted to find similarities between reports people are making. We found a trend that customers were creating the same reports. As the reporting team, we should be smart enough to be able to provide these reports out of the box for our users.
Our Personas.
Let's Synthesize this.
We then began to convert all of that data into nuggets. In other words, wrangling all the information into a more stable and coherent format. This time was so essential to begin to develop shared knowledge & understanding with the team. We capture key findings and points of synthesis on sticky notes and stuck them on the wall!
We held a Design Thinking Workshop specific around reporting in Procore. This lab is a guided "vehicle" for those who interface with our clients, to share their domain knowledge. I strongly believe that every person is a designer and that if you give people some tools, context, and let them free that they can come up with some amazing ideas/insights into things you may not have thought about!
As a squad, we all began to story map our user's journey in creating a report. Left to Right: Sam Meyer (Lead Engineer) & Tony Dihn (FE Engineer)
Early Wireframes.
High Fidelity Mocks + Prototype.
After rounds and rounds of iteration, this is where we landed.
The Product Roadmap.
Our team mapped our features to our company OKR, and Product Strategy. Also, there are many dependencies with some of these features, so that was also taken into account.
So...what happened next.
Insights 2.0 began in August 2017. Our goal is to have this redesign product delivered to our customers by November of 2018 at our Groundbreak event. But due to the backend/information architecture complexity, the leadership team decided to reallocate our FE resources to another team while the BE engineers tackled our architecture.
In August of 2019, Procore acquired a business intelligence product called “Construction BI.” Read article here.