Client Consolidation

Background

Accountants using Xero Practice Manager and Xero HQ were managing client records across two disconnected products — creating duplicate, inconsistent data and costing them billable time.

From past research, accountants shared maintaining one database across both products would be a massive timesaver that would eliminate manual checking and speed up workflow. Rather than Xero guessing which records to consolidate and risk getting the wrong records, we required accountants to select their source of truth — ensuring accuracy while giving them control over their data migration.

“ 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

Before I joined, a previous team spent 18 months on a solution that was ultimately unshippable. Leadership was reluctant to invest in the problem again and set a hard 6-month deadline — with very little room for error.To stay unblocked at that pace, I set up weekly cross-team checkpoints with engineering, product, and leadership to surface blockers early and keep decisions moving.

Refining key userflows

Before designing anything new, I reviewed the previous team's research, user flows and testing results with our product designers, tech leads and PMs to agree on what to keep, cut and change.

Some of the key changes we adjusted in our experience included:

Removed the ability to create new records mid-process — introducing new records would create the same duplication problem
Simplified onboarding to the minimum context needed to proceed — the previous concept had a lengthy setup flow that past testing showed caused significant drop-off
Limited the process to one staff member at a time — multiple edits would have created conflicting changes when trying to complete the migration
Added the ability to unarchive excluded records — without a safety net, the risk of error was too high for them to proceed confidently

Leading the User Testing process

Despite deadline pressure, I advocated for moderated testing across our core three markets (New Zealand, Australia and the United Kingdom) to validate our redesign wouldn't compromise usability. I also presented these findings directly to various stakeholders to keep user needs visible in our tight deadline.

Some of the key changes we adjusted in our experience included:

Participants felt more confident to proceed if there was an onboarding video to watch at the start
Participants wanted to be able to download their data offline so they had another record in case they needed to reference the original
Participants mentioned they usually use one product between Xero HQ and Xero Practice Manager as their main source of truth for client records and would only want to bring across client records from one of these tools rather than a mix of both
Our UX copy needed to be clearer this process could only be done once as participants assumed they could do this again
Knowing how long the migration and process would take was important to know to help block out time to focus on and complete this process

“ 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

Key design updates

Key areas where I applied design changes from past learnings on the previous concept and from testing results were:

Adding a quick-select option for accountants to pull all clients from one product at once — user testing results showed most accountants had a single source of truth and selecting individually wasn’t as common
Adding a stepper component to show progress through the migration — without it, accountants couldn't gauge how much time to block out, which was a key concern they raised
Participants mentioned they usually use one product between Xero HQ and Xero Practice Manager as their main source of truth for client records and would only want to bring across client records from one of these tools rather than a mix of both
Our UX copy needed to be clearer this process could only be done once as participants assumed they could do this again
Knowing how long the migration and process would take was important to know to help block out time to focus on and complete this process

Ensuring UX quality does not suffer

Under pressure, we had many challenging conversations with team members about not cutting back on key UX functionality. Examples where teams wanted to cut 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 raise what the risks would be if we didn’t include these design updates, we utilised a UX risk register from NNG at meetings to ensure we collectively explained why these are issues to fix and how doing these updates will improve the experience to the level of quality we wanted to deliver to accountants.Leadership agreed that removing this functionality would seriously compromise efficiency, even if it meant we could go out to market faster.
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Outcome

The feature launched in November 2023. Within 8 months, 86,000 practices had completed the migration — delivered by a small design team working to a fraction of the previous team's timeline.

“ 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 intense journey together. ” - Product design lead shoutout when we launched in November 2023