Design leader and UX specialist.
All work and no play
PRODUCT DESIGN, UX
Head of Product & Design, Curtis Fitch Ltd
2019 - present
In 2010, CF Suite was launched as a B2B solution that included modules for contract management, sourcing, supplier workflows and analytics. The software has been commercially successful with many loyal clients across retail, banking, government and the media.
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In the last couple of years, we've started working more closely with our clients to understand their challenges today, and how we can evolve the solution to meet their needs.
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But CF Suite is a complicated software solution. It's 12 years old and built on old tech. How could we meet the changing needs of the market?
Discovery and definition
We regularly gather feedback from our CF Suite clients. Along with direct feedback on the software we are also able to talk to clients about their challenges and opportunities for us to help.
CF Suite is an enterprise solution aimed at procurement professionals. We were getting the usual feedback about optimising user journeys and interface aesthetics but we were also starting to hear a number of our clients talk about a specific issue.
Tail spend is generally defined as the amount of money that an organisation spends on purchases that make up approximately 80% of transactions but only 20% of total spend volume.
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Tail spend is fragmented, reaching across a vast and unchecked supplier network. Its the small amounts that people spend everyday outside of any process or procurement jurisdiction. In large organisations, procurement teams tend to get involved in strategic spend only. Strategic spend is generally anything over £250,000. Any spend below this doesn't go through a procurement process and is largely unreported and unchecked.
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Clients wanted to bring tail spend out into the light. Making it visible would allow them to review how and where money was being spent.
We had defined a tail spend process through research, now we needed to deliver that process through technology. CF Suite was not a solution for thousands of users distributed across the business and out in the field. We knew the solution had to be available to everyone. It had to be mobile and simple. The project was named Qozo - short for Quote Zone.
We started working with a couple of key clients who were really engaged with our feedback loop. Next Retail were a key partner for us. I visited the Next head office where I tested conceptual prototypes with a range of different user roles.
Design
The initial Qozo concepts were really well received. The key user journeys were straightforward and the interface was simple and intuitive. It was just a bit dull. I wanted to go further and create a dark horse prototype - something much further removed from the traditional procurement software experience.
I worked with one of our specialist partners to come up different ideas for branding and design for the Qozo. Procurement isn't that exciting but if we could introduce some colour and character maybe we could make daily admin more fun. We could add engaging motion and animations to bring it to life.
We realised that a lot of the journeys we'd created could be seen in popular consumer tools. Qozo was essentially question creation and answering with a document repository. We put together some simple prototypes around quizzes and forms and went out to test them with the public.
The research feedback gave us encouragement to continue exploring the consumer offering. We've started looking into gamification and social feeds to create a useful and rewarding experience.
Today
Qozo is in use inside Next Retail as a pilot project with additional clients and teams due to come online as features are added. We're gathering valuable user data all the time and Next have some initial visibility of their tail spend.
We continue to refine the public proposition for Qozo.
More branding for Qozo can be seen here.