My role: UX design, UX research
Team: Product manager, 3 Engineers, Business analyst, Design system lead
Duration: February to June 2023
Backgound
Coupa was seeing signs of customer dissatisfaction, not just through support tickets or complaints, but through real business losses. In several cases, including large enterprise customers like Disney, DHL... we noticed that even when Coupa helped save millions through sourcing optimization, the user experience within procurement remained a bottleneck, slowing down invoice cycles and affecting supplier enablement.
One clear signal came from internal performance metrics: Pending Buyer Action was consistently one of the longest wait states in the procurement lifecycle. Requisitions would sit idle for days, sometimes weeks, because buyers couldn’t tell which requests were theirs — or worse, teams would duplicate efforts or miss approvals altogether.
Requests were sitting idle because there was no clear ownership
Rather than jumping straight into design, I stepped back to define a high-level strategy to tackle the root problem. I broke it down into three milestones, which were presented during the October 2022 walkthrough and targeted for completion by February 2023.
• Milestones 1: Clear ownership — Buyers should be able to easily view what’s assigned to them and use bulk actions to manage their queue efficiently.
• Milestones 2: Team level visibility — A Buyer Manager Dashboard to help procurement managers monitor team capacity, reassign work, and reduce duplicate efforts.
•Milestones 3: Enhance efficiency — For large enterprise buyers, we proposed introducing a rule builder to automatically assign requests based on criteria like category or requester. For June walkthrough.
Now that we had identified the systemic root cause, I needed to get closer to the human side of the problem. How was this broken accountability model affecting our user day to day?
To work around this, we analyzed comments from Coupa’s customer community forum and interviewed internal buyers within Coupa to gather more insights.
After mapping out day-in-the-life journeys across different buyer personas, we began to see repeating patterns, and identified pain points: missed ownership, manual workarounds, and a lack of visibility into who is working on what.
Exploring Data Visualization Needs
To gather feedback efficiently, I conducted user testing with our internal teams. Initially, bar charts were used to display data, but users found the visual layout overwhelming with too many categories, which made it difficult to get an overview. This feedback guided our iterations, leading to simplified and more focused data representations that allowed users to see the bigger picture at a glance.
After our exploratory phase, we converged on utilizing a stacked bar chart. This approach allowed us to distinctly differentiate between statuses like 'Pending Buyer Action', 'In Sourcing', and 'Pending Approval'. As a result, we furnished Buyer Managers with a comprehensive, at-a-glance understanding of the requisition workflows.
The journey to enhance the buyer's interaction with the requisition management system was a collaborative endeavor, involving cross-functional teams dedicated to elevating the procurement process within Coupa. In tandem with refining the visual aspects of the dashboard, we worked closely with engineering, product management, and user experience teams to enhance the functionality and responsiveness of the buyer datatable. Our collective goal was to transform it into a tool that not only presents data but also facilitates immediate action and decision-making.
Original requisition datatable
Managers can now quickly give out tasks to buyers with our new dashboard
The result of our iterative design process, enriched by stakeholder feedback and cross-departmental collaboration, was a dashboard that went beyond mere analytics. It became an essential tool for Buyer Managers to orchestrate their team's workflow effectively. With the redesigned buyer datatable, the dashboard transformed into a strategic command center, enabling managers to make informed assignments that optimize team performance and expedite the procurement cycle.
The implementation of the revamped requisition datatable and manager dashboard has significantly elevated the user experience for our vast user base. The improved data visualization and streamlined functionality have been instrumental in enhancing the productivity of over 60,000 users, empowering them to navigate the procurement landscape with confidence and strategic insight.
Looking ahead, one exciting opportunity in this project could later have AI-powered smart suggestions. As users perform frequent, repetitive actions, such as reassigning similar requisitions the system could detect these patterns and proactively suggest automation rules or bulk actions. We feel this could really level up with our system by helping users save time, reduce manual effort, and create a more intelligent, responsive workflow especially for teams managing high volumes of assignments.
