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Constrafor

Design a bid management feature for contractors to streamline the bidding workflow.

My Role

UX Designer — Secondary Research, Wireframing, Interaction Design, Prototyping

Project Type

Product vision for an early stage start-up

Timeline

2019 - 2020

Project Overview

Constrafor is a web application that aims to help increase the productivity of the construction industry by providing more visibility and control to contractor’s back-office tasks and focus more on high level work.

I worked directly with the founder during the early stage the start-up to develop a prototypes for investors. I helped secure funding by building an end-to-end flow for bid-management experience.

Context

The Legacy Process in the Construction Industry

Nowadays, the construction industry is one of the least digitalized industries. Many contractors still manually send and mange their bids. The procurement, however, is a complex process which includes finding suppliers to get quotes, sending RFQ, choosing quotes, contracting, etc. With the traditional practices, contractors not only spend a lot of time and effort to go through this process, but also easily loose track of their bids and miss updates from the stakeholders.

The company aims to transform the way contractors procure by providing efficient and reliable software solutions to manage and keep track of their bids.

The Problem

The Bidding Process is Broken

As mention, in the construction industry, people still use old-fashion way to manage their bids. This paper-heavy, labor intensive, and manual bidding process is too time-consuming and expensive.

There's 3 biggest user pain points:

The workflow is disconnected across platforms—emails, words, excel sheets, and papers.

How might we…

…help contractors request and manage bids more efficiently and reduce turnaround time?

Principles

Design Principles

The following design principles were formed during the research phase to drive the design decisions:

Stay Centralized

Manage the full bidding process, from bid creation to bid award, in one place to eliminate friction.

Real-time Visibility

Allow users keep track of RFQ status and stay on the same page to bridge the information gap.

Be Flexible.

Pay attention to the various use cases, requirements, and workflow of different users and clinics, especially those different from what we’ve seen in hospitals. Provide flexibility and customization options to meet the varied needs of users and clinics.

Reflections

Design with time constraints

The progress of the project was looking good and the achievement was well-recognized at the 2023 Q2 QBR meeting. The project successfully shed the lights on the scalability of xHIS, as well as the capability to accommodate 3rd-party developers building for our platforms.

However, the organization's goals shifted, and AICS decided to reallocate resources to another project. As a result, the xHIS Lite team was disbanded in May 2023, and the project was put on hold.

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