Bulk Reminders:

Bulk reminders is a bulk actions feature to allow Accountants to send multiple email reminders to clients that have outstanding documents that need signing.

My key responsibilities in this feature work include:

  • Defining our users problem and studying quantitative data trends

  • Competitor analysis (internal Xero features and external features)

  • Userflows

  • Prototyping and Unmoderated user testing

  • Final UI Design

Users problem:

When accountants send out documents for clients to sign with Xero’s E-sign feature called Document Packs, they can send reminder emails to clients that need to sign outstanding documents. However, they could only send reminder emails per document one by one. This was causing accountants to do a lot of admin work that took time away from their main tasks to do.

Observing quantitative data trends:

I collaborated with my Product Manager to find quantitative data in Mixpanel to see how many accountants were sending reminders on a regular basis.

Our data showed that we had around 2,500 reminder emails going out every 3 months and 48% of those were being sent in the same week a document was sent out for clients to sign. With this in mind, we felt we could improve the efficiency of this feature to help them send more emails faster to save time.

Competitor analysis:

I did both competitor analysis on bulk selection patterns. After reviewing different examples, I summarized the key trends with a S.W.O.T analysis write up.

Common trends seen between features inside of Xero and outside of Xero include:

  • Bulk selections were on the left handed side

  • Actions users can do when using bulk selection features are disabled until at least one item is selected

  • When selecting items, a tally should appear to help let users know how many have been selected

Prototyping and Unmoderated user testing:

I worked closely with my product manager on identifying edge cases in the userflow that we need to cater for when adding in the bulk selection functionality. From there, we made a prototype of our happy path and took it to unmoderated user testing.

As our main focus was on validating the usability of our feature, we decided to go with unmoderated testing to get a fresh perspective from accountants outside of Xero which also allowed us to get a larger number of participants in the accounting space to provide feedback. 

I created our unmoderated script as part of our research plan before uploading both our prototype and script to usertesting.com. From here we gained 15 participants who provided feedback on the usability of our feature.

Key trends we found include: 

  • When trying to find the sent tab to use the Bulk Reminders feature, a fair amount of users didn’t instinctively realize they need to go here 

  • Originally, we had a progress icon that was being confused to new users as a second checkbox they had to click 

  • On our review screen, having extra numeric numbers on the screen such as on our illustrations were making users confused how many emails get sent out

“ I don't know if I am supposed to click both left (checkbox) and also right (progress wheel) ” - Participant when sharing feedback on the progress wheel

Final UI Design:

The final UI Design utilized Xero’s internal design system XUI to ensure there was consistency with the components used and our designs followed the existing bulk selection patterns where we could for interaction consistency.

We also improved our onboarding with the Appcues software to help alert accountants that our Bulk Reminders feature is avaliable to use.

End result:

Our Bulk Reminders feature launched in July 2023. We observed our users actions with Mixpanel on the following 3 months. Our results showed the following:

  • Users were now sending 9 reminders on average at once rather than sending reminder emails individually

  • The highest number of reminders sent by practices was 40 at a time

  • The number of Document Packs users increased by 8% when they saw our efficiency improvement

Our feature was also presented at our monthly share back with positive internal feedback on the results and the visual design work from various stakeholders.