Accounting App - Product Designer

The challenge

Design the client’s first customer facing product, a responsive web application add-on for cloud based accounting software, from scratch and within seven weeks.  

Born on the back of innovation research, an opportunity was identified for my client to create a tool that would make their end user's lives easier.  I was tasked with designing the first release of the product, which would include limited functionality for the MLP, while keeping the future expansion and releases of the product in mind.

Approach and methods

Integrate UX design sprints into Agile development sprints already underway, in an effort to bring the designs ahead of the build as quickly as possible and validate them with usability testing.

Using a Design Wall, I showcased:

• Project timelines

• In-progress designs

• User flows

• Previous research

The wall began covered in sketches, then wireframes, and finally full visual designs, which I refreshed twice a week to ensure team meetings at the wall brought us all on the same page. 

Key learnings

Existing software functionality drove user expectations for the add-on which had not been scoped.  Without this functionality, the new tool would add time for users instead of reduce it.

After the results of the first round of usability testing, the team pivoted to ensure user expectations would be met.  We prioritized investigating the feasibility and design of this additional functionality, and rolled it into the second round of testing which confirmed the requirement from the user's perspective.  Without uncovering this, the product would have been likely to fail upon launch.  As this was the initial product release and first customer facing product my client had ever offered, it was imperative that the design was right from the start.

Outcome

My client was able to confidently launch their first customer facing product, meeting business requirements and user needs, ready to go Live on time and within budget. 

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