CPQ

Case Study

CPQ Enterprise Financial Software

Overview

Brought in to revamp their aging software

Problem

FPX was a CPQ market leader for decades, but their software was showing it’s age, and they were now competing with Salesforce.

Target

Compete with Salesforce

Team

Head of Software
UX Design Consultant (Me)
Developers

My Role

I was the singular UX Designer within this company.

BACKGROUND

Brought on as a UX Design consultant, I spent most of 2019 helping my remote client re-architect and re-design their financial software.

“Configure-Price-Quote” (CPQ) software allows sales people to create complex, real-time, hyper-accurate quotes for customers

PROBLEM

My client was on the forefront of Configure-Price-Quote (CPQ) software in the 1990s-2000s. And while they had updated their software over the years, it still had an old, enterprise presentation-layer. And the data modeling backend was impossibly clunky and slow. Customer were never able to maintain their own product catalogs, so FPX made greater and greater revenues for catalog maintenance.

But modern upstarts gained marketshare over the past decade, and recent industry-reviews weren’t kind.

So they brought in help.

Understanding and Connecting

I wasn’t the first UX person brought on. Market research gave them ideas on what worked and what didn't. And the first UX contractor helped collect valuable insights, and he worked out some high-level concepts.

I joined the team in March, 2019 to help re-concept and redesign the overall experiences

After some weeks of learning the software, I started playing with base concepts for how data flows...

...and for methods to more easily create new data definitions

Based on data from internal users (data modelers that create and manage client databases), I started working through pain points and inefficiencies that weren't immediately obvious to existing users.

I re-imagined how we could make the software work better for the users by making it more configurable, and allowing users to more easily build their custom experiences

Wireframes

After working through various ways to improve each experience, I began integrating these improvements with other user and stakeholder ideas, building and testing wireframes to vet these ideas

Expanded ideas for a CPQ Dashboard

And here is a sample of a robust Interface builder that would allow data modelers to pair their data with a custom UI using drag 'n drop components within the Admin application.

This is one section of the Product UI, where users can manage lists of products

And this is where a user begins a complex configuration process, now with faceted search and e-commerce-like compare features

Finished Comps

By late Fall, we were ready to translate the wireframes I had created into fully styled, pixel-perfect comps ... so I did that.

And what about Mobile?

When I joined them, my client only had an experimental mobile app, with limited functionality. A complete, fully-functioning mobile version of the CPQ application was not originally something we spec'd. But we had bandwidth, and a fantastic off-shore development team that could deliver.

An easily understood, brand-specific, onboarding and navigation.