Xero Client Consolidation

The problem to solve

Accountants using Xero Practice Manager and Xero HQ had to enter client records (the details of the businesses they do work for) separately across these tools. This resulted in inconsistent record data and wasted time manually checking which is the most accurate record to use for work history. The idea of maintaining one database across both products was seen as a massive timesaver that would eliminate manual checking and speed up workflow.

“Ideally that data would be one record that can be pushed across all systems in one go instead of having to change it everywhere in many different places.” - Customer quote from past research

In order for Xero to migrate the right client records into a single dataset, we required accountants to select which client records and business accounts to bring into the one database. This would ensure the right records are selected rather than Xero guessing which were the correct client records to bring across.

The business concern

Prior to me joining this project, a team had produced a previous concept that went far over time and ended up with a solution unable to be built in an acceptable timeframe. This meant Xero was extremely cautious about doing this work again and gave us all a challenging hard set deadline of 6 months to redo the past faults and avoid over running resources again for a poor result.

To ensure that we were meeting the tight timeline, we set up regular weekly meetings with multiple teams and leadership to go over the work in progress and raise concerns early to ensure they were addressed to keep unblocked.

Refining the userflows

Reviewing the research, user-flows and testing results the past team produced, I worked with product design team members and product managers to get alignment with what we will keep and remove from the prior concept.

Some of the key changes we adjusted in our experience from the past team include:

• Removing the ability to create new records in this process to keep users focusing on selecting the right records to keep 

• Providing a more simplified onboarding page to help provide the right context before starting this process than a larger onboarding process like before

• Reducing how many users can do this process at once to reduce edge cases where users are overriding each other

• Allowing users to unarchive a client record they excluded from this process to avoid re-making new records 

• Cutting down on old accordions in the past design that required users to click and view one client record at a time rather than as a simpler list that reduces repetitive clicks
  
  

Core userflows for this product feature

Leading testing and reporting

Alongside design responsibilities, I also led the entire moderated user testing process. Despite feeling pressure to try deliver on time, I highlighted that it was vital to do user testing on our updated concept to confirm we still solved our goals for the project and our products usability was not compromised.

Key insights that emerge from running multiple sessions were: 

• Without onboarding documentation at the start, users felt less confident to proceed

• Our UX copy needed to be more clearer this process could only be done once and what happens after the process is completed 

• Participants wanted to be able to download their data offline so they had another record incase they needed to have an original reference 

• Knowing how long the migration would take was seen as important to know about after completing this process
  

After finishing each report, I would also work hard to ensure insights were shared to key stakeholders so that our users' needs were not lost in the time pressure set on us.

“I'm loving these user testing sessions and learning more about how our customers use our products! Well done on facilitating these Michael Szeto! So patient and polite!” - Product manager’s shoutout from attending user testing sessions

User testing report pages

Final UI Design

For the final UI design, I utilised a lot of existing design system components for visual design consistency and help speed up developers workflow with existing components.

Examples of visual design elements we included to help improve our experience included:

• using steppers to highlight where in the process accountants were

• Cutting down on old accordions in the past design that required users to click and view one client record at a time rather than as a simpler list that reduces repetitive clicks

• Including links to relevant help content with each step in the process to help guide accountants if they got lost

• designing different permission pages to avoid overwriting conflicts

Ensuring UX quality does not suffer

Due to the immense time pressure from the business, we had many challenging conversations with team members about not cutting back on key UX quality updates we needed. Examples where teams were trying to cut back on quality included not putting data in alphabetical order, removing bulk action functionality and cutting out the ability to unarchive client records after completing the process.

To help ensure we raised what the risk is for not doing these updates, we utilised a UX risk register from NNG at meetings to ensure we have collectively explained why these are issues we need to fix and how these will improve the level of quality we needed to deliver to users.

The end result was a successful team agreement with leadership backing us that we could not remove these additional pieces of functionality as these would compromise efficiency despite the fact it would lead to a faster launch.

End result

The client consolidation project launched on November 2023 and migrated 86,000 practices in its first 8 months which was recognised as a massive achievement across the business for what minimal resources design had at the time too.

Today, we released the client consolidation experience, and I want to give a big shoutout to Michael Szeto! He has been absolutely killing it on this work, and I am so grateful for his hard work and dedication while we went through this quick but intense journey together. - Product design lead shoutout when we launched in November 2023

The client consolidation feature has now officially wrapped up as 100% of Xero accountants finished this process and can now expect their client data to be consistent across both the Xero HQ and Xero Practice manager products.