My Role: Lead UX Designer

Date: Oct 2023

Tools: Figma

Team: Lead UX Designer, Jr Designer, Development Squad, PM, PO

Challenge: Update and redesign initial experience to support 5000 account mappings

Accountants bring in large amounts of data and need to categories them into certain buckets before being able to get insights into them to process and complete their accounting workflows. Mapping the data to categories at Caseware was called account mapping, this process was often handled by jr accounts and data clerks. The originally experience had many bugs and improvement tickets filled against it, and there was a new need from a large client to support 5000 accounts in the data mapping process.

Goals

Redesign for easier navigation

The left hand navigation wasn’t serving users and we could tell. Our pendo integration let us know that users were not navigating efficiently or at all most of the time. This took up valuable space

Get users to usable data faster

A company wide goal was to get users to usable data faster, this being the second step in the data management flow, we knew if we could get them quickly moving through this phase we’d get them at least 1% closer to usable data faster.

Update backend and UX for 5000 accounts

Evolving accounting needs meant we need to support even more data coming through, we went from 50 accounts supported to 5000 … which made interactions at a bulk level very important

Update accessibility requirements

The original experience had no accessibility requirements met … needless to say this wasn’t acceptable and we need to tackle it as more legal requirements around the world made it necessary for software to have the abilities to support every users.

User interviews

We were lucky to have an absolute all-star team of user researchers at CaseWare, and we used them to our advantage. The team was able to setup 10 user interviews for us assisting us in creating protocols and scripts and then allowed us to take over to conduct the interviews. We learnt a lot from discussing with our users and pulled some more goals and user stories from these interviews:

Debits and credits not shown

A key insight was that we weren’t showing debits and credits effectively. There was no visual indicators or colours to allow for scalability or quick decision making.

Business rules

Users wanted more complex business rules to be abled … if this then that … unmappable accounts based on values … many other complex business rules.

Undo/Redo

The users found that the original implementation was punishing because it didn’t allow for correction of their mistakes.

Default categories

With even more data coming in and never ending hierarchies that the accountants needed to filter the accounts into, the users wanted the ability to have default categories assigned when accounts were mapped to the top of the hierarchy.

Design Phase

User journey Mapping

In the early phase of designer we got together with the PM and dev team to understand and break down where this user journey really fit into the data management life cycle and what tasks the users needed to do here.

Early ITERATION

We iterated early … iterated a lot. What micro interactions did we need? Drag and drop? Filtering? Searching? What did these actions look like, how does the user interact with them in a bulk manor … what kind of data tables did we need?

User testing

Once we aligned on a route we wanted to take as a trio, we started prototyping and getting it in front of users to test if they could complete the tasks needed, if they could preform it quickly and efficiently, and if they had any other feedback.

After testing we observed and heard the users were completing the tasks, but still were unsure on how the bulk actions were working, and really how they could complete the job easier. Taking this feedback we knew we missed the mark and we had to go back to iterating to solve the problem.

Final Designs

Who am I kidding … designs are never final, its always ongoing.

Working with the dev team we got these designs into production rather quickly, we didn’t seem many hiccups in the production phase because we had been tided together at the hip in constant communication the whole way down the journey.

Project Impact

• Decreased time to usable data by 20%

• Adopted by EY

• Core feature in the data management life cycle