Case Study · Enterprise SaaS

Streamlined AP Approvals

Role: Lead Designer · Discovery → Ship
Context: Hyland · 3 enterprise AP organizations
Year: 2020 - 2021

The problem

When invoices stall inside AP, companies lose money and vendor relationships strain. Hyland's approval experience was a general-purpose content interface being used for a workflow it was never built for. AP teams tracked urgency in spreadsheets, chased signatures over email, and had no way to approve anything away from a desktop. I owned this end-to-end.

What I led

I ran discovery with 25 AP clerks across 4 enterprise teams. During this project, I had a working partnership with all stakeholders involved. I led competitive analysis, facilitated workshops to map how approvals actually move through an org, and designed a purpose-built desktop and mobile workflow that surfaced urgency, consolidated context, and respected how AP triages a day. I partnered directly with engineering on feasibility trade-offs so what we designed was what we could ship.

Outcome

1st

Remote approvals capability shipped for these enterprise AP teams

A tool that changed how the teams work. Manual tracking replaced with purpose-built workflow. Invoice cycle time down, and remote approvals shipped for the first time in these organizations.

Building lasting partnerships with coworkers was a welcomed result of this project. Having the trust from the teams involved and from engineering to make the trade-offs required to ship carried along many future projects..

Gallery

Legacy AP approvals interface — Before - the legacy approvals interface

UX research synthesis with AP teams — UXR synthesis across 25 AP clerks and 4 teams

Whiteboard flow mapping — Workshop whiteboard - mapping the approval flow