Easily verify Brazilian e-invoices (nota fiscal)

About the Project

In short: billing clerks checking Brazilian e-invoices kept leaving SAP for a government website. I ran research with the team and designed one SAP Fiori app modelled on the paper invoice they already knew. It shipped to SAP customers in 2016, and users rated it 6.2 out of 8 for usability.

Billing clerks currently use an on-premise solution to view nota fiscal (Brazilian electronic invoice) documents to check errors based on specific business criteria. Nota fiscal is an invoice document that is issued only in Brazil. Every product that is sold is accompanied by a nota fiscal. This was the first cloud-native app for SAP’s Brazil localization, replacing J1BNFE, a transaction over 20 years old.

Challenges

• Give users a new cloud experience for viewing Brazilian invoice (nota fiscal) documents.

• Stakeholders believe they don’t need to research because they already know the business.

Process

I facilitated workshops where we (the team) created a user research strategy to understand which points were more painful while using the current on-premise tool and current practices while checking the documents.

Using interviews and user shadowing, the team discovered that users were using a government-provided web tool to view documents, which caused a lot of context switches from on-premise to this external website.

This government website was analyzed during benchmark research. On user shadowing sessions, we were able to gather data information usage from the current on-premise tool. Field-usage analysis across 5 clients showed the transaction was only used to copy the invoice key.

Clerks kept switching to a government website

• Context switch was painful to the user;

• Users were used to information architecture based on a paper document/government website;

• Some important data-points were many clicks away on the current tool;

• Many data-points were not used.

  
  

  

One Fiori app, modelled on the paper invoice

Following SAP Fiori (SAP’s Design System) guidelines, a web app was conceived where users can filter, group, and sort data based on personalized criteria.

The app shipped to SAP’s global customer base in 2016, replacing the external government-site check with a single Fiori flow — with filter, group, and sort modeled on the paper document users already knew.

In a post-launch survey, Verify Nota Fiscal users rated the app 7.1 out of 8 for functionality and 6.7 for terminology, averaging 6.2 out of 8 across seven usability dimensions.

Project Retrospective

• There is no truth about business needs outside the customer’s environment.

• The team must consist of people who want to stand up and work.

• Upper management support is crucial to a User-Centered project in a non-design driven company.

  
  

  

Post-launch survey averaged 6.2/8 across seven usability dimensions — and terminology work (6.7/8) mattered as much as the interface itself.