Xero Client Consolidation

The problem to solve

Accountants using Xero Practice Manager and Xero HQ maintained duplicate client records across both tools, creating inconsistent data and wasted time confirming which record was accurate to use. In past research, accountants shared maintaining one database across both products would be a massive timesaver that would eliminate manual checking and speed up workflow.

“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

The business concern

Prior to me joining this project, a team produced a previous concept that went well over time and ended up with a solution unable to be built. This meant Xero’s leadership was extremely cautious about doing this work again and set a challenging deadline of 6 months to redo the old teams past faults and avoid over running on time again.

To ensure that we met this tight timeline, we set up regular weekly meetings with multiple teams and leadership to go over the work in progress and raise concerns early to ensure they were addressed and to keep unblocked.

Refining the key Userflows

After reviewing the previous team's research and designs, I worked with the designers and product managers to decide what to keep and remove from the prior concept.

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

• Removing the ability to create new records so that users focused on selecting the right records to keep and simplifying the workflow

• Providing a clearer onboarding page to provide the right context to accountants before they start doing this process

• Locking off the experience to one user at a time to stop users potentially overriding each others work

• Allowing users to unarchive a client record they excluded from this process to avoid making new records and reduce risk of deleting important data

Core userflows for this product feature

Leading the User Testing and Reporting

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.

Key insights that emerged were: 

• 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 incase they needed to an original reference 

• 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 than a mix of both

• Our UX copy needed to be more 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

User testing report pages

Final UI Design

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

• Adding a page to select all clients in one product if that is their main source of truth

• Using steppers to highlight where in the process accountants were

• Cutting down on old accordions in the past design to reduce repetitive clicks

• designing different permission pages to avoid overwriting conflicts

I also collaborated closely with a dedicated front-end engineer to ensure that our designs could be built in the timeframe allocated.

Ensuring UX quality does not suffer

Due to the immense pressure, we had many challenging conversations with team members about not cutting back on key UX functionality. Examples where teams were trying to cut back on experience quality 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 help raise what the risk is for not doing these updates and create accountability, we utilised a UX risk register from NNG at meetings to ensure we have 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 users.

The end result was a successful agreement with leadership backing us that removing these additional pieces of functionality would seriously compromise efficiency eve if removing these changes could give a faster launch to market.

Outcome

The client consolidation project launched on November 2023 and migrated 86,000 practices in its first 8 months which was recognised as a massive achievement across the business for what resources design had at the time too.

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

The client consolidation tool closed down in November 2024 as 100% of Xero accountants finished this process and can now all Xero accountants can expect their client data to be consistent across both Xero HQ and Xero Practice manager.