Bulk Reminders

Role
‍Lead product designer — I led the end to end design process and owned the full unmoderated testing process

Outcome

emails being sent at one time

increase in feature usage

Background

Accountants could only send reminder emails one folder at a time with Xero's e-signing tool Document Packs. This was creating repetitive manual work that pulled them away from billable client tasks.

I collaborated with my Product Manager to find data in Mixpanel to see how many reminders were being sent by accountants. Data revealed 2,500 reminder emails were sent quarterly, with 48% going out within a week of sending documents to sign. This pattern indicated accountants were doing repetitive follow-up work early which gave us confidence they'd adopt a bulk feature to speed up their workflow.

Unmoderated User Testing

We chose unmoderated over moderated testing as our goal was validating usability, not user value, and we could get a larger number of participants faster. Recruiting outside of Xero's existing user base also meant getting unbiased perspectives from accountants with no prior product familiarity. I built our unmoderated script and research plan before uploading both our prototype and script to usertesting.com.

Key areas we found to fix from 15 participants included

When trying to find the sent tab to use the new feature, many didn't instinctively go there. We applied Intercom onboarding tooltips to help guide users to the feature.

Progress icons were confusing to new users as they thought it was a second checkbox they had to click so we removed them to reduce confusion in the final UI.

Extra numbers on illustrations were making users confused how many emails would get sent out so we updated our illustrations to not include numbers and remove confusion.

Without testing, we would have shipped a feature accountants couldn't find which would have directly affected our 8% increase in feature usage.

Pushing for a mobile experience

Originally, our feature wasn't built with mobile in mind. This meant we didn't have a consistent mobile experience and users couldn't use this feature on mobile. I pushed for us to have a built out responsive design to help ensure users could access our tool on smaller devices and not constrain them to desktop only.

By having a mobile experience, this meant we could increase feature usage across devices. Without a mobile experience, users would have been unable to complete this experience across devices and could have been a negative impact to how many users adopt the feature.

Process improvements

My manager asked that I present my process and learnings to the design team. Following the presentation, my GM recognised the value of the technique and requested I document the process so the wider team could run their own unmoderated testing sessions.

A few months later, myself and 2 other product designers were asked to share how we applied this technique at our monthly practice sync to promote best design practice.

Outcome

emails being sent at one time

increase in feature usage

The Bulk Reminders feature launched in July 2023. Tracking usage in Mixpanel over 3 months also showed accountants were also sending 9 reminder emails at once on average.

Our feature was also presented in our monthly practice meetings and received positive feedback on the visual design and success metrics.