At the start of the project, stakeholder and user interviews gave us a comprehensive understanding of the pain points of the previous application, as well as users' habits, customs and ways of interacting with the service. It also helped us to understand and conceptualise complex processes such as travel reimbursement.

My colleague and I continuously conducted qualitative interviews with selected "power users" throughout the project, which was a great way to get quick feedback, sanity checks and user involvement in the design process.

Resulting from these interviews, a key insight was the highly variable context in which the application is used. An employee might want to quickly scan a receipt after refuelling their car at a petrol station. On the contrary, a manager may be taking their time when setting up new budget allowances for the team.

These different use cases influenced one of the main improvements we achieved with the redesign: the introduction of a new navigation logic and tab structure. This allows to cater for 'on the go' receipt uploads from wherever a user is, whilst also enabling swift access for other heavily-used functionalities.

Within the PayPense app, we carefully distinguished the roles of employees and managers. While both submit expenses, managers have the additional task of reviewing and approving them. To make their job easier, we designed and introduced new features such as a chat function to get additional clarification from an employee on a particular expense. Or a "batch processing view", an smart feature that organises expense requests to make reviewing smoother and more time-efficient.

On a project of this scale, one thing is essential: solid system design. Our project included a visual redesign of the user interface to match HRS Groups' corporate branding, who aquired PayPense.

So I started early on to set up and maintain a design system. Not only was it fun, it helped us ensure consistency and scalability of the application, as well as speeding up our workflows tremendously.

The design system was an important source for our collaboration with the developers. The same was true for a prototype of the complete application - which we created to test the designs, but which also proved to be very helpful in collaborating with the developers.

By focusing on unique user needs, we've made PayPense an app that's not just functional, but much more than that; it's a user-friendly tool that fits seamlessly into busy routines.