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UX & INFORMATION DESIGN

Design of a
Workflow-Driven
Document
Management
System


Client

PwC Tax

Date Completed

December 2020

Design Team

Christopher Moorehead
Design Director & Information Architect
Matthew Smith
UX Designer
Robert Tu
Project Manager

Background 

The staff of PwC’s Tax practice use a number of tools to carry out their Assurance and Consulting engagements, as well as integrate with the international PwC network. The central element in this collection of tools was the Document Management System (DMS), a proprietary system that was expensive to maintain, difficult to customize, and increasingly ineffective and frustrating to use. It was therefore decided that the DMS would be replaced by a new system built in Microsoft Sharepoint Online (SPO). PwC’s Design team was retained to design a user experience that would meet the needs of various users across the tax practice. 

Design Issues

Replacing an entire content management system for thousands of users is no easy task. With these large transformations sometimes the user experience gets overlooked and as a result user adoption, satisfaction and productivity is negatively impacted. 

Design Process

The process involved an extensive review of the existing DMS architecture, as well as user interviews with representatives from each of the Tax practice groups to determine workflow and current state “pain points”. The optimal user flow was mapped and validated, and a future-state information architecture was designed to parallel the user flow, provide an intuitive structure for document storage/retrieval, and scale up effectively as engagements were added to the DMS. An intuitive, workflow-based user interface was designed and tested with user representatives, and the design was improved through the insights gained from these feedback sessions, with the final DMS design being implemented in Microsoft SharePoint Online. 

Outcome 

We conducted 7 research sessions. The feedback was consistently positive. The response was positive, with the majority of participants rating it 5/5 in a post-study survey (with the lowest rating being 4/5). One of the key takeaways was how valuable the concept of “sign-posting” was perceived to be, through the engagement work flows (validating pain points from our current state map). Each participant expressed a desire to see a similar system in the re-imagined Tax DMS, where a user’s tasks — that is, what they were expected to do, and when — would be clear at each stage of the engagement.

Using Format