QUICKBOOKS ONLINE
Projects
ROLE
Group Design Manager
DATE
February 2019
Customers can get a bird's eye view of all their Projects, all in one place. They can easily track labor costs, payroll, and expenses with job costing. Customers can now view project profitability in a glance with clear dashboards and reports.
Coached the design team to collaborate across multiple product areas - Accounting, Payroll, and TSheets in the Quickbooks ecosystem, in order to deliver a delightful customer experience. There was 80% adoption at launch.
CUSTOMER PROBLEM
Project based businesses were unable to track and view the overall financial health of their projects, in terms of profits and costs in Quickbooks. They did not know if they were making money, which made them feel not in control and it was hard to plan for the future.
WHY CREATE PROJECTS?
- - Projects help customers track their finances and profits by job.
- - Projects help record hourly cost rates for employees, track billable or non-billable time to a project, see payroll costs (wages and taxes) by project.
- - Tracking profitability and being able to estimate the costs associated with a job helps them manage and grow their business with confidence.
DESIGN CHALLENGE
Creating a seamless end-to-end experience with multiple cross functional partners and stakeholders across multiple product areas in Quickbooks Online ecosystem – Accounting, Payroll, and TSheets.
RESEARCH AND DESIGN PROCESS
Collaboration
The design team collaborated closely with product managers across the product areas and visited the remote engineering team to build trust and a working relationship which led to successful alignment on the customer problem and business goals.
Unified product vision
The design team created a customer experience map, based on customer interviews and competitive analysis. This led to the ideal state designs. This was followed by multiple rounds of rapid prototyping of key concepts and the learnings from testing informed the final designs.
- Key learnings from user testing
- - Seeing the profit margin and an overview of project profitability was an aha moment.
- - Customers wanted to see trends and patterns across projects.
- - New and existing customers found cost rates useful.
Final designs – We introduced project overview and a profitability tracker, which gave businesses a snapshot of their projects financial health. The ability to view transactions, time activity and reports in one place empowered customers to make better business decisions. There was 80% adoption at launch.
