The accounting process was held back by old technology and a disjointed software experience. Our objective was to transform the complex processes, generating efficiencies, resulting in significant financial savings.
We were taking customers from a 30-year-old desktop product to the cloud, aiming to deliver a brand-new, highly efficient workflow for accountants across Australia and New Zealand. My focus in this 0-1 product transformation was tackling the collaboration challenge between accounting practices and their clients.
Throughout the project, I gathered requirements from stakeholders, mapped out our assumptions, and identified areas where we needed a better understanding of customer problems. After slicing the epic into smaller chunks, I tailored research methods to improve each critical part of the job life cycle. Through 65 impactful research sessions, I distilled insights to design solutions and increased practice efficiency, ultimately driving down costs. I also voiced usability concerns to PMs and resolved conflicts through collaboration with the wider design team and customer co-design. Additionally, I contributed new UI components to the design library.
When all the pieces came together, this visionary design was featured in the MYOB annual showcase and generated excitement. Customers told us they could save '80-100 minutes per client per year.' This built confidence in our product roadmap.
The current accounting process hinders accountants from focusing on high-value work. They need a solution that not only performs perfect calculations but also simplifies the workflow, maximizes communication efficiency, and enables more strategic and advisory opportunities
Plenty of internal knowledge gave us a good starting point for understanding the tax return and compliance workflow and key user journeys.In collaboration with other designers, my role is to divide and conquer some of the sub-features on this journey map, which ultimately contribute to simplifying the whole accounting job experience.
The first discovery I worked on was tasks, there are no clear steps to help a job move from end to end, causing work to be unmanageable and lacking accountability. We imagine that using tasks will be efficient for workflow management, allowing us to track progress and collaborate with clients and the internal team.
The research behind the existing journey map provides a bird's-eye view of complex accounting services in steps, but we need a better definition of tasks and highlighting blind spots and research gaps for the feature team.
To avoid doubling up on the same discoveries, I kicked off stakeholder interviews in the first week of features, gathering knowledge from cross-functional teams to align our current understanding.
With the consolidated learnings and insights from our research team, I created a Story map to materialize the end-to-end task interaction.
It was effective at communicating the roles and business processes involved during a compliance job life cycle and creating use cases for tasks. It made it easy for stakeholders to take action.
We align on the concept of a bunch of standard and ad-hoc tasks, and we go in-depth for each one. We then do dot voting to prioritize them based on customer value and impact on improving user experience, as well as considering the business value and technical effort.
From the prioritisation workshop, we also identify areas where we need additional research and design.
~breathe~
One of the ad-hoc tasks is client queries, where the accountants ask the clients for additional information and documents to support their numbers and calculations.
Accountants could spend a significant amount of time managing queries and double-handling documents.
Email threads can quickly become convoluted and disorganized, making it difficult to track the progress of queries.
Our feature goal is to facilitate efficient query drafting, review, and resolution.
I jumped into a 2-week research sprint with 7 practice partners, alongside a BA and PM, to delve deep into the workflow, different variations, and tools accountants use for the query, and consolidate pain points.
Key Takeaways
🔍 Accountants use Excel or notes to draft up queries for clients.
🔍 Clients use fax or emails causing downstream pain for accountants.
The client showed us screenshots of how they use Excel or notes to draft queries for clients, which can be time-consuming to reshape the questions and confusing when trying to find resolutions to difficult queries.
Friction point: PM suggested reusing the task component for making client queries
While I agreed that the approach reduces cost to built and some UX patterns can be shared, I felt it's important to recognize the unique user involvement in each case, and the decision to mix and combine could have a negative impact on the overall user experience.
I shared my concerns:
Concern 1: Overwhelming
Merging these two concepts could result in an overwhelming amount of ad-hoc client communication clutter within a standard workflow.
Concern 2: Miss out on the feature
Queries are linked to core accounts and transactions, while tasks guide the job workflow at a high level. Combining the requirements could lead to a bulky and confusing system and lead to missing out.
Concern 3: Learning curve
Queries have their own workflow involving drafts, batch reviews, responses, and resolutions, whereas tasks follow a more straightforward incomplete/completed logic.
Concern 4: Difference in ownership
Tasks are primarily owned internally, while batches of queries are sent to clients with an internal accountant responsible for follow-up.
A collaborative approach was taken for the concept design, as this feature links the portal and core accounting parts.
I teamed up with the core accounting design teams in Sydney for an online whiteboarding session using InVision Freehand. They offered an objective review of how client queries were considered from their perspective and aligned my expectations.
Additional customer co-design sessions were conducted with the PM to further validate client expectations and desired outcomes. After a stack of concepts were drafted, I provided clear design suggestions and demos, and the PM finally approved them!
Key Takeaways
🔍 Queries, as an email alternative, allow clients to respond, share documents, provide tracking and status updates.
🔍 Tasks guide the workflow moving forward and typically have either a completed or incomplete status.
We got team's agreement to implement this sub feature. Line item queries, which are made in different forms and workpapers, are now bubbling up to the top job level for better visibility.
Clients can reply to each query with context and clarity, and completed query statuses are notified to accountants for easy tracking.
By centralizing communication within the accountant's actual work, we have minimized the time spent on admin tasks.
~breathe~
At the start of a job, accountants likes to query clients to fill in the standard checklist for tax returns, and this artifact is heavily print-oriented. Having irrelevant questions on the checklist to go through is a lengthy process, and it's hard to track the progress or link to documents.
We reimagined an optimal checklist experience for accountants and their clients, resulting in a more efficient and organized process.
See real checklist examples that allows us to explore opportunities to modernize Excel templates into dynamic checklists.
To improve accuracy and relevance, our approach were validated with more customers and received input from internal subject matter experts to guide us on industry standards.
Here we achieve the design milestone for another subfeature solution.
In the client view, the action to upload or answer follow-up questions will only show according to the client's selection. This improves clarity, reduces time, and overall difficulty.
On the accounts side, we saw an opportunity to make the document the source data, which automatically links to workpapers. This flows through all compliance forms and ultimately saves time for final reporting.
"It works for a lot of our individual clients and even new clients as well." - Accounting Partner
“When can we use this? so much time could be saved from not having to dig into each document.” - Preparer
~breathe~
There are other parts of the workflow that I researched and designed.
We use the Kano model to help the team see the utmost pain directly from digital singing research. I also ensured to have interviews with customers prior to Kano to understand the real signing scenarios and remove any assumptions.
While working on the task list, I also co-designed with users and collaborated with visual designers on the anatomy of the new master-detail layout as an addition to the design system through research.
Piece all parts, tasks, client queries, checklists, review processes, job layouts, and core accounting done by different designers into a cohesive experience. Share with senior stakeholders, aligning it with their vision, and thanks for the regular feedback loop with them during the feature research and design. The approach was quickly approved and taken to our annual INCITE for the public.
After several months of work, I designed 80 screens. It was challenging, to say the least, to see how different parts of the app interact, fill them with real-scale data, and go through scenarios in a holistic view. It's really exciting, and we revisited a number of practices with the proposed solution.
“save 80min-100min per client per year” - Senior Accountant
Showcasing all the new upcoming features that get customers really excited. It would cut down the time taken to prepare clients' financials by a considerable margin and let them focus on more valuable work. Lots of customers enrolled in the beta to test out MVPs based on the vision they see, which gave us the confidence that the prototype had a huge influence in solidifying the product strategy and creating clear roadmaps for how we were going to deliver this vision.
