Xero Client Consolidation

Role
‍1 of 3 product designers — I led the design process for the client migration experience and the full user testing process.

Outcome
86,000+
practices migrated by July 2024
100%
practices migrated by Oct 2024

Background

Accountants using Xero Practice Manager and Xero HQ managed client records across two separate products with their own databases. This meant that accountants were having to waste time manually checking which records were the most accurate taking time away from their billable client work.


The business concern

A previous team had spent 18 months working on a solution for this problem that ended with an unfeasible solution that didn't end up launching. Because of this experience, leadership was reluctant to invest as much time in the problem again and set a hard 6-month deadline to deliver the feature.

I joined as one of three designers and within 6 months we shipped the migration experience to Xero users.
“ 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 research

Mapping out the experience to help our final designs

Because we were re-writing the whole experience, I mapped out the edge cases and flow for the client consolidation experience. Not mapping out the flow would have led to mis-alignment across designers, product managers and engineers and having a proper userflow created a source of truth for the whole team to follow.

Advocating for user testing

Stakeholders were urging us to skip user testing to save time to get our feature out the door and meet the deadline. I advocated for user testing in our weekly sync with stakeholders by raising that our redesign was significantly different to the previous concept and not yet validated.



I ran 2 studies and interviewed 15 users across New Zealand, Australia and the United Kingdom. Some of the key trends were
Participants lacked confidence without more context upfront, so we added a walkthrough video in the onboarding screen to set expectations
Participants wanted a safety net in case they selected the wrong records, so I added the ability to download their existing data as a CSV before proceeding
Participants shared they'd typically use one product as their source of truth rather than both, so I introduced a quick select screen to allow users to bring across all records from one source.
Without advocating for user testing, we would have missed these 3 critical updates that seriously impacted user confidence in a process that can only be completed once.
“ 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 from Xero

Adding a new quick select page

The previous concept forced users to select client records from each platform rather than quickly select from just one.

After learning from user testing that it was more common for users to want to select all client records from one platform rather than both, I raised this finding and requested that we include this as a step in the experience. Even though adding this would make users have to do additional clicks and enter a new page, it meant that users would be able to quick select all clients from one source rather than being intimidated with a much bigger list to select from on the first step.

Without this change, users would have been forced to manually identify and select records from a combined list of both platforms which would increase time to complete our migration process.

Advocating for UX quality

Due to time pressure, we had many challenging conversations with team members about not cutting back on key UX functionality such as 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 leadership see what each tradeoff meant, we utilised a UX risk register from NNG meetings to ensure we collectively explained why doing these UX updates will improve the experience to the level of quality we needed to deliver to accountants.


The outcome was leadership being aligned to our thinking that removing the functionality listed would seriously compromise efficiency, even if it meant we could go out to market faster. Without the UX risk register, we would have had much more misalignment on what key ux functionality we would include or not with leadership and risked delivering a subpar experience for accountants.

Outcome

86,000+
practices migrated by July 2024
100%
practices migrated by Oct 2024
The feature launched in November 2023 by our small design team working to a third of the previous team's timeline.

Delivering the client consolidation experience to Xero users unblocked the staff and job management teams from having to support multiple products and allowed them to build new features that have consistent and accurate client data.

By October 2024, the client consolidation tool was shut down as Xero accountants could now expect their database to be consistent across both products.
“ 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 from Xero
© Michael Szeto | Melbourne, Australia
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