The following case study illustrates how UX principles can be applied beyond traditional design contexts to solve organisational workflow challenges.
Overview
A national spa group releases monthly promotions across branches, ideally by the 25th of each month. As the graphic designer, I am responsible for designing and distributing the visual marketing materials based on the information provided to me (treatment costings). Frequent errors in the initial data, occurring in roughly 25% of monthly cycles, led to costly redesigns, delays, and missed deadlines. So I initiated and a project to redesign this process from a user-centred perspective.
*All pricing, details and descriptions have been altered to protect confidentiality.
Spa Group - Applied UX Thinking
Role:
UX Designer, Systems Thinker, Strategist
Timeline:
2023 - 2024
*This initiative fell outside of my typical role as Graphic Designer, I acted as the product lead - from problem discovery to solution design and advocacy. I identified a business inefficiency and defined a solution to solve it, then created an interconnected tool that automated calculations and standardised inputs, transforming a disorganised process into a coherent system.
Problem
The manual creation of promotional packages was a significant operational bottleneck. An operations manager had to manually calculate prices and profits by juggling multiple disorganised Excel files. This process was:
Error-Prone: Manual entry led to frequent mistakes in treatment names and prices.
Inefficient: The process was slow, often delaying the entire marketing timeline.
Fragile: The workflow was dependent on a single person and lacked a collaborative review process, leading to overlooked mistakes.
Constraints
This project was undertaken within a traditionally structured environment with specific constraints:
varying levels of digital literacy among users
a culture of limited collaboration
organisational resistance to change
Research
I conducted contextual inquiries by observing the workflow and interviewing key stakeholders (operations and marketing manager) to identify core pain points. My analysis revealed that:
Information was siloed across multiple documents, requiring tedious manual transfer.
The existing "review process" was broken, with team members deferring responsibility and assuming others had completed checks.
The core user, while proficient in Excel, was overwhelmed by the complexity and manual nature of the task.
Target Users: Operations managers responsible for creating promotional packages.
Pain Points
Disorganised & Siloed Data
Critical data was spread across multiple documents, increasing error likelihood.
High Risk of Human Error
Manual entry often led to mistakes that weren't caught until the design stage.
Bottlenecked Collaboration
A lack of a clear process led to overlooked mistakes and deferred responsibility.
Hypothesis
I believe that by providing operations managers with a semi-automated Excel calculator that pre-populates treatment data and auto-calculates profits, we can reduce data entry errors to near zero and cut the promo creation time by at least 20%.
User Flow
Below compares two user flows. One as the current process (Before) and one as the suggested process (After).
User Flow Before:
User Flow After:
Usability Tests
Iteration & Feedback
I conducted a live demo and feedback session with the team. While formal usability testing was not feasible due to organisational constraints, this session was crucial for iterating on the design.
After receiving feedback, I incorporated flexible options into the spreadsheet, such as allowing manual overrides, to accommodate user comfort and edge cases.
Solution
I designed and built a user-friendly, semi-automated 'Specials Calculator' in Excel (a familiar environment to ensure comfort). The solution featured:
Dropdown Menus: For selecting treatments, eliminating typos.
Automated Calculations: Formulas auto-calculated profits and discounts instantly.
Linked Data: Pulled from a single source to eliminate copy-paste errors.
Familiar Layout: Designed to mirror the old spreadsheet's structure to ease the transition.
Video 1: The old, manual process required navigating multiple files and manual entry.
Time to create one special = 2:05 minutes
Video 2: The new, semi-automated process: select treatments, enter a discount, and watch it calculate.
New process time for same example = 0:25 minutes
Results
80% Time Reduction: The solution reduced the core data entry task from 2:05 minutes to just 25 seconds, a 80% increase in efficiency.
Error Elimination: The automated system fundamentally eradicated manual entry errors (typos, miscalculations) for those who used it.
A Valuable Lesson in Change Management: Despite the clear metrics, full team adoption was a challenge.
This highlighted a critical lesson: in change-averse environments, a perfect technical solution is only half the battle; it must be paired with strong change management and executive buy-in to succeed.
Reflections and next steps
Solve Real Problems: The best design solves a tangible business problem, even if it's just a spreadsheet.
Design for the User's Reality: Meeting users in a familiar tool (Excel) was more important than building a "perfect" tool in a new platform.
Advocacy is Part of the Job: A designer must also be an advocate, communicating the value of a solution to all stakeholders to ensure adoption.
Quantify Everything: Measurable outcomes (like time saved) are the most powerful tool for building a case for change.