While working in the financials space at Buildertrend in middle 2022, leadership wanted us to create a feature for us to take advantage of the OCR technology we had acquired through a The Home Depot partnership and allow office managers to streamline their costs. They also wanted it ready to show off at the International Builders Show in February of 2023.

For this project, my team and I needed to understand the users current journey. So we started off by talking to office managers. After many interviews, we understood the personas we would be dealing with, their pain points, and their usage, whether it is web or mobile.

Office Manager

Often

Rarely

Pain Points

• Has piles of receipts and invoices that need to be uploaded into Buildertrend.
• Can be a hassle to take photos, email to themselves and upload to Buildertrend.
• Has to ping workers about getting receipt (if some are missing) and additional information.

Project Manager

Rarely

Often

Pain Points

• Receipts pile up in their vehicle and are slow to getting these towards Office Managers.
• Sometimes has to upload receipts as bills to Buildertrend themselves.
• Too many administrative fields to fill out when they just want to upload a document.

Field Worker

Never

Rarely

Pain Points

• Receipts pile up in their vehicle and are slow to getting these towards Office Managers/Project Managers. When they do they may forget what job material was for
• Field worker account has no access to administrative features. If they did, too many administrative fields to fill out when they just want to upload a document.

So how do we streamline this process? All receipts end up at Buildertrend end of day and have to be manually itemized. So how can we make this process easier and faster for users? The solution was Cost Inbox.

For our first iteration with this feature, instead of emailing, texting, or manually dropping off receipts with a project manager or office manager, field workers and project managers can just quickly scan the receipt from their mobile device. The receipt is then sent to the cost inbox where OCR extracts the data and fills out the needed information and a office manager can review the expenses before they allocate the costs to a job or jobs.

This also would streamline adding receipts to Buildertrend for office managers who can upload receipts just like field workers and project managers and take advantage of OCR extracting the data to make their process much faster. They still have the option to upload from web (if they want to scan items) or email online receipts straight to the cost inbox!

Mobile Finalized Feature

Web Finalized Feature

Once receipts are uploaded to this cost inbox, they are able to review the expenses and create a bill to match their QuickBooks account to the credit card transaction and or bill a home owner.

We were able to get this out by the beginning of 2023 and met the International Builders Show deadline. If youd like to know more about this feature, check out this Article.

When I first joined Buildertrend, a lot of their site consisted of old webform components and stylings. Thanks to a master component library we established, we were able to update most of our site to React and use a lot of the MCL components we had, some features like our To-Dos lacked proper attention.

While being part of our Quick Wins team, our focus was to make updates to features that did not require a lot of development effort but did improve a users experience when interacting with these fields.

Items like Priority, Reminders, Tags, and Attachments were hidden behind a “Show More” tertiary screen. During this time, the Systems team was working on a new library, and within that library we had Progressive Disclosure buttons that when clicked, it would expand the field and user would be able to interact with it.

The great part about using a Progressive Disclosure button for these fields was that the user would be able to see first hand what options are available to them and it would not be hidden behind yet another button they would have to interact with.

Of course we needed to verify that this would be a good change for the user, so what did we do next? We tested it! We used an unmoderated comparative testing method to test if:

1. Users would be able to set a priority, tag, and reminder
2. How long it would take for the user to complete the tasks

At the end of this test, we found that the new version with the Progressive Disclosure Buttons had a quicker success rate for the users, mostly because users knew the fields were on the same page as to where we had a lot of users go into the checklist of the original version to try and find Priority, not knowing it was hidden behind the Tertiary “Show More” section.