An initiative called "Pátio Digital" was started inside the São Paulo Municipal Department of Education with the challenge of making the process inside the Secretary more transparent, optimized and organized to the society. As part of this initiative, the system SIG_Escola has been developed and implemented to help Schools, Direction Boards and the Secretariat in the requirement to control financial transfers and their expenses.
The challenge
​
Today, the process is really complicated and totally made in spreadsheets and a lot of paper. The Schools send files with all the expenses and documents to the Direction Board to check. If something is wrong it is send it back to review and this goes on until everything is correct and the Direction can send all the reports to the Secretariat. The principal problem? Each Direction has at least 100 schools on their responsability.
​
​
Goal
​
How can we facilitate and optimize the process of technical directors in validating the schools expenses?
​
​
Metodology
Considering that we already had passed for a discovery moment to understand the original process and some other needs for the direction team that were already prototyped and developed, this delivery was based on interaction design. So I had some brainstorms with the team, made some prototypes and tested individualy and with a focus group.
Ideate + Prototype
​
As a result of these first conversations between the P.O, the supervisor of the technical boards and the UX Research, we defined as main features of the interface the possibility of mapping schools by the status of expenses report, monitoring balances, changing status, defining returns and making comments.
​
With that defined, I drew the flows, mapped the interactions and finalized the screens. After introducing the P.O we decided it was time to test it out with the technicians.
Testing + Analyze
​
So we decided to test with 4 technicals. Each one of them from a different regional board, different times of experience in the function and defining two with more contact with technology and two with less contact with technology.
​
The script was based on reproduce the work they already used to do, but using the features that I had prototype. Each test take 2 hours to be complete and all the technical were very participative, answering questions and giving suggestions.
The conclusion was that, making the idea interactive, it was easy for users to relate and understand the proposal. With this we identified that some points that we considered exceptions were actually very common activities and this made me review flows and redesign part of the features.
Back to Figma
​
After the tests, all of this process was documented by me in reports that I showed to all team in our review of the sprint and after new discussions, myself and the P.O came along with new user stories to fix the issues that we found.
​
After that was time for me to go back to Figma, made some new flows and review some prototypes.
Group focus + Delivery
​
After finishing the new screens, the P.O asked me to do a new round of tests with the same users as the first round to validate the changes and present a conclusion of the process.
I then suggested that it would be better do a focus group with all of them bringing a summary of the reports, presenting each new flow and collecting mini discussions about them. The focus group was a success, with a very participative group that helped us to fully understand that everything was ok and ready to go to development.
Final Design with video
