Automation Billing System
The Automation Billing System (ABS) was the first project I worked on as a C#/SQL developer. In this project, my partner and I developed a C#/.Net Windows Forms Application to help our client’s finance department process over $2M of MNR work orders and invoice transactions via EDI. We flew with our client to Phoenix, Arizona to meet with the billing department and learn about their users’ needs.
Simplicity Matters
The images to the right are the first and final UI layouts that my team and I worked on. Our development was based on the agile methodology, and within this we unintentionally followed the design thinking framework as well. We worked iteratively with our users who would speak with us daily for system support, and inevitably we received a lot of feedback regarding UI requirements.
The first iteration of the design was based heavily on our users’ requirements, and was a strong reflection of the prior system they were using. There were many functions displayed on their previous product’s UI, and at their request we included all the same buttons in our developed product as well. At this point, we also decided to use a black/gray/white color palette at request of the users. They were comfortable with this color scheme because it matched their original applications.
After launch, our users were reaching out to us very often for system support, often needing training or answers to questions. Through this discourse, our team decided to streamline the functionality and reduce visual clutter to ensure the users were successful in using the system to the full potential. For the second iteration of the design, my team and I focused on consolidating as many of the buttons as possible into minimal drop-down lists. Here the functionality was split into 4 modules. In the download module at the top, we combined the different buttons from the first design iteration into 4 drop down lists. I created a table in SQL that categorized the different functionalities and their relation to each other. We then pointed these drop down lists to that table to autofill the next dropdown list as applicable.