Simplifying Cost Estimation:
The Project Pricing Tool Experience
Cost Estimation & Budgeting | UX-UI
Background
An IT organization was facing significant challenges with the existing project pricing process. The manual approach was not only time-consuming but also prone to errors, causing delays in proposal generation and impacting our competitive edge in the market. Teams were all struggling with disconnected workflows and lack of visibility into resource allocation and pricing calculations.
My Role & Responsibilities
As the UI/UX designer for this project, I wore multiple hats throughout the design process. My primary responsibilities included participating in user research, creating user personas, mapping user journeys, designing wireframes and prototypes, and facilitating collaboration between all internal stakeholders.
Discovery & Research
The discovery phase began with stakeholder meeting across all departments. I conducted one-on-one meeting sessions with sales team members, pre-sales specialists, delivery managers, leadership team members, finance personnel, and system administrators to understand their current workflows and pain points.
Through these meetings, I discovered that the sales team was spending approximately 40% of their time on manual pricing calculations, which was significantly impacting their ability to respond quickly to client inquiries. The pre-sales team struggled with resource allocation visibility, often having to manually track unnamed resources and their associated costs across multiple projects.
I also conducted a competitive analysis to understand how other organizations were solving similar problems. This helped me identify best practices in pricing tool design and areas where we could differentiate our solution.
Problems look like :
User facing significant challenges with existing project pricing process. The manual approach was not only time-consuming but also prone to errors, causing delays in proposal generation and impacting our competitive edge in the market.
Users involve :
The sales team, pre-sales team, delivery team, leadership, and finance teams were all struggling with disconnected workflows and lack of visibility into resource allocation and pricing calculations
Success Criteria :
Commercial Automation while maintaining accuracy and providing real-time visibility to all stakeholders.
Define
Based on the discovery session's findings, I defined the core user problems, user personas and business objectives. I noticed that users looking for a unified platform that could serve the diverse needs of multiple department's user groups while maintaining simplicity and efficiency.
Ideate & Prototype
The ideation phase involved collaborative workshops with stakeholders to brainstorm solutions for each identified problem. I facilitated design thinking sessions where we explored different approaches to deal creation, resource loading, and approval workflows.
Solution 1 : Streamlined Deal Creation and Strategic Commercial Planning
For the deal creation process, I designed a step-by-step wizard that guides users through client details, deal specifics, and project type selection. This approach reduced cognitive load and ensured that all necessary information was captured consistently. The design accommodated different project types (Fixed Price, T&M, Value-Based) with conditional fields that appeared based on user selections
Solution 2 : Unnamed resource visibility and margin planning
This approach automatically calculates billable rates and total project costs in real-time, providing immediate feedback to users about the financial impact of their decisions
The design principles
I followed :
Simplicity:
Complex pricing calculations should be automated and hidden from users
Flexibility:
The system should accommodate different project types and pricing models
Transparency:
All stakeholders should have visibility into the pricing process
Efficiency:
Reduce manual effort and processing time
Accuracy:
Minimize human error through automation and validation
Evaluation
The evaluation phase involved multiple rounds of flow & various goal completion task testing with representatives from each stakeholder group. I conducted usability testing sessions where participants performed typical tasks like creating a new deal, loading resources, and navigating the approval workflow.
Results
The final design successfully addressed all the key objectives outlined in the project requirements. The solution reduced manual effort by streamlining the pricing process into a logical, step-by-step workflow that guides users through each phase of deal creation and approval.
With user interface design users are able to create new deals and complete resource loading significantly faster than the previous manual process. The automated calculations eliminated the errors that were common in the manual system, improving accuracy and reducing the need for rework
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