Software contract management is hard.
Tracking which products employees use, what each product contract mandates, when and if renewals take place, who should receive expiration or upcoming renewal alerts, and how much is being spent on software is, needless to say, exhausting.
G2 Track's contract management feature helps organizations easily organize, maintain, and manage their software contracts.
I was the sole designer responsible for designing G2 Track's new contract management system to better support users and drive further engagement.
Initial state
Up until recently, G2 Track offered limited functionality for managing contracts which created a variety of problems:
- Users were overwhelmed with the amount of information on one screen.
- Existing data models didn’t support both complex multi-period and simple contracts.
- Users couldn’t easily share insights and reports with colleagues.
Research
Insights from in-person, over the phone customer feedback, and usability testing were instrumental in shaping user outcomes and designs.
We carefully crafted personas to demystify problems and better understand different contract roles and responsibilities.
It became clear that managing and maintaining contracts was often distributed among numerous individuals, meaning ease of documentation, editing, updating, and sharing contracts were our highest priorities.
Prototyping to communicate early ideas
Due to the amount of requirement complexities, we used mockups and prototypes early on to communicate ideas and flows internally.
Early mockups helped educate the team on what, why, and how we were building. They were instrumental in sparking a variety of early-stage discussions with engineers, which in-turn provided valuable feedback regarding technical feasibility.
Due to the complex nature of the work, we went through numerous revisions.
We reduced development time and improved learnability through reusing components as much as possible. For example, while designing the side navigation and cards, it was suggested by one of the engineers that we could reuse code from the fixed left nav bar for our overview card. This idea led to easier implementation and overall user experience improvement. A win / win / win for engineers, designers, and users.
Solutions
Better form design
Users really struggled adding their contracts. The amount of information on one screen was intimidating and overwhelming. Due to the form’s high complexity and extensive inputs, the old form had a high abandonment rate. To solve this problem, we split the form into multiple steps. By grouping related information and ordering the form logically, users are now asked to enter essential contract data before being bothered by optional details.
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Expanding data models
Due to the lack of important data models available, users were unable to enter in correct data and track changes properly, leaving many users frustrated and confused. We added more data models to support both complex and simple contracts as well as month-to-month subscriptions.
Improving reporting
Users needed better ways to view, share, filter, and sort key contract details. For quick insights, we eliminated unnecessary data columns in the overview and added important information such as license count tied to each contract and subscription. Insights are key to driving business success so it was a priority to provide users ease of access to reporting and analytics from the data they were already inputting into the system.
Introducing workflows
There are a lot of moving parts in a growing company. Sometimes contract owners leave and without a contract being reassigned, unexpected renewals or cancellations can cost thousands. We introduced workflows to help organizations ensure contracts are reassigned immediately. Workflows also included reminders and notifications for events such as contract auto-renewals.
"Great tool for visibility into software spend. The contracts module really helps us organize and maintain our current contracts in one place. Having reminders when contracts are coming up for renewals helps us consciously decide if we want to renew a product, reduce/add licenses."
Carla Schwender, Accounting Manager at Threekit 3D & Augmented Reality
