The stakeholder forest

This paper discusses the redesign of PeopleSoft's Enterprise Expenses product from a product that was notorious for it's complexity into a product that was both usable and one of PeopleSoft's best selling products. The process used was a combination of best practices from user-centered design, business and marketing to deliver a usable application on a pure-html "no-code on the client" platform. The design effort was also a collaboration of design, usability engineers, business strategy, functional analysts and developers (and of course our customers!) At the same time, the process needed to track the competing interests of various stakeholders: clients, their end users, their business processes, our technical requirements, our limited resources and our internal stakeholders. The designed solution had to work within a framework that could not be re-written. A poorly working metaphor was redefined into a concept that would work better with the end-users.