Bulk Reminders
Bulk reminders is a bulk actions feature to allow Accountants to send multiple email reminders to clients that have outstanding documents that need signing when using Xero’s E-sign feature Document Packs.
At the time, accountants could only send reminder emails one folder at a time, creating repetitive admin work that pulled them away from billable client tasks.
Observing quantitative data trends
When kicking off this project, I collaborated with my Product Manager to find quantitative data in Mixpanel to see how many reminders were being sent by accountants.
Our 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 — helping validate our hypothesis that they'd adopt a bulk feature to speed up this task rather than sending emails one-by-one.
Competitor Analysis and main Userflow
I reviewed different examples of bulk action patterns from both Xero and external products like Dropbox and Docusign and summarized key trends in a S.W.O.T analysis write up. Doing a competitor analysis helped create a unified agreement on how our experience would work between product and design.
Key trends I applied to my design concepts included:
Keeping bulk selections on the left handed side
Actions users can do when using bulk selection features remain disabled until at least one row of items is selected
When selecting items, a tally should appear to help let users know how many have been selected
If there is a select all option, then this should have an indeterminate state if all items are not selected
Prototyping and Unmoderated User Testing
As our main focus was on validating usability, we went with unmoderated testing to gain a larger number of participants to provide feedback.
I created our unmoderated script as part of our research plan before uploading both our prototype and script to usertesting.com. From here we gained 15 participants who provided usability feedback on our feature.
Key areas we found to fix from feedback include:
When trying to find the sent tab to use the Bulk Reminders feature, a fair amount of users didn’t instinctively realize they need to go here
Progress icons were confusing to new users as they thought it was a second checkbox they had to click
Having extra numeric numbers on the screen such as on our illustrations were making users confused how many emails would get sent out
Onboarding was not present in our prototype, but users had shared they wanted to have a better onboarding structure to help learn about the updated functionality
“ I don't know if I am supposed to click both left (checkbox) and also right (progress wheel) ” - Participant when sharing feedback on the progress wheel
Final UI Design
The final UI utilized Xero’s internal design system XUI to ensure there was better component and interaction design consistency.
Other areas of the final design I also improved included:
Designing the mobile experience to ensure accountants can use this feature on smaller devices
Improving UX copy to highlight that participants will get multiple reminders if they are being reminded about multiple documents to sign
Using Intercom’s onboarding tooltips to help raise awareness of the update in the product
Outcome
Our Bulk Reminders feature launched in July 2023. We observed our users actions with Mixpanel over 3 months which showed the following results:
On average, accountants were now sending 9 reminder emails at once rather than sending each reminder email individually
The highest number of reminder emails sent was 40 at one time
The number of Document Packs users increased by 8% when they saw our improvement for this tool
Our feature was also presented at our monthly share back with positive feedback on the results and the visual design work from various stakeholders.
