For Konica Minolta, we designed an application that helps companies track and manage all equipment they own and lend to their employees – this could include computers, monitors, company cars, desks, and more. Essentially, it's a digital inventory that records the location of each item, who is currently using it, and its condition – from the moment the company purchases it until it is disposed of. This allows the company to know what resources are available and easily manage the transfer of items between employees or their repairs.
What We Achieved Together:
We designed the UX and UI of the application, including a comprehensive library of design components in Figma.
We utilized the format of intensive design hackathons.
We created an interactive application prototype ready for development.
How to Optimally Manage Company Equipment?
Konica Minolta contacted us to improve the UX and UI of their existing asset management application – that is, for managing company equipment. How does such an application actually work in practice?
- Companies own items/equipment, which they either store themselves or assign to employees. They need to record and transfer this equipment.
- The application handles the entire life cycle of such an item. For example, when a company orders new monitors for employees. Once the equipment arrives, the inventory manager enters it into the application. Then the monitors are given to the employees using a handover protocol.
- After some time, the employee may return the hardware because they are leaving, or because the hardware has malfunctioned and needs to be sent for repair.
- All these operations and statuses can be handled and recorded in the application.
Before we joined the project, the application could add new equipment, assign status (reserved, borrowed, etc.), and transfer equipment to employees. The client had a number of ideas for expanding the application, gathering them from discussions with IT administrators in the companies with which they tested the application and from an analysis of competing solutions.
During an Intensive Hackathon, We Designed Two Application Modules
During design hackathons, we created prototypes of some of these ideas and tested them with potential users. We created two modules:
Reservation module – employees could share items among themselves and reserve them within the application.
Coworking module – builds upon workplace reservations to provide a situational overview of who is working and from where.
Ultimately, only the ordering module made it into the implementation; after testing, we postponed the presence tracking module as it was too complex and not as in-demand by customers.
A Component Library Was Essential
After the initial hackathon, the client invited us for long-term cooperation, during which we finalized the hackathon designs and prepared them for handover to the developers. Our goal was to eliminate obvious usability errors, unify the UI, create a component library in Figma, and prepare a larger part of the application for mobile display. During the process, we also added various improvements that resulted from conversations with customers and user testing. In 6 months of consistent work, with occasional intensive hackathons, we reached a comfortable situation with a backlog reserve and a well-organized UX library.
Design Solved Data Import Automation
One of the features we addressed was data import. When a new potential customer sets up the application, they must have the option to import data from their previous system, or perhaps just from a spreadsheet where they most likely already have some records. The data import we designed was intended to significantly speed up this process. Extensive research into competing solutions helped us with the design of the solution. We then designed our solution as the maximum possible in the shortest possible time. The proposed prototype performed well in user tests and during production deployment.
The Result: A Prototype Ready for Testing and Development
The output for the client was interactive prototypes in Figma, on which we tested concepts within the team and with users. From a research perspective, we conducted several tests with potential users whom we invited to hackathons. Because the application addressed a segment where much had already been invented, we also devoted a lot of time to desk research and competitor analysis. At the same time, we prepared outputs ready for developers to ensure a smooth development process. For both us and the client, the format of design hackathons proved successful, allowing the internal team to present a large amount of work to stakeholders.
