Company
Crunch Accounting
My role
Research, Strategy, Prototyping, Testing, Product Design
Team
1 Product Designer (me),
1 Product Manager,
6 Engineers
Challenge
The goal of this project was to help our customers, small business owners, easily track their financials and plan for business growth and stability. I started by reviewing the existing graphs, which were displayed across different dashboards. The most frequently reported issue was that the existing graphs refreshed their data every year. I made sure the new designs will give users access to all of their data and involved engineers very early in the project to understand the potential impact on performance. I conducted a survey to dive deeper into what data would be helpful to see for small business owners.
Reviewing other dashboard examples
I investigated the different dashboards available in Freshbooks, FreeAgent, QuickBooks and Xero. They showed between 3 to 4 graphs on their dashboards, not overwhelming their users with too much information. Charts focused on profit and loss, which aligned with the content requested by our users. I also looked at unrelated companies, which provided insight into designing performance dashboards. I focused on Mixpanel, Garmin Connect and Fitbit. They showed a wide range of data, providing multiple ways of comparing and customizing the displayed information.
What data would help users prepare for tax season?
In-house team of client managers and accountants understood what information would be useful to show, to help our users with performance tracking and preparing for taxes. I run a series of individual workshops with 5 different team members to brainstorm different ideas for the type of information that would be the most useful for our users.
User testing to evaluate chart ideas
I created a set of ideas for different charts based on the initial research. I conducted user testing to evaluate the protypes and understand if naming is easy to understand. As the first task, I was interested to see if the titles of the graphs are self-explanatory and I asked participants to describe what they are and why they would be useful. Then we prioritized them from the most useful to least, to gain an understanding of which graphs are the most helpful.
I learned that tax estimates should include a description explaining what affects the numbers. This will help users save the right amount and understand what affects the tax amount. Expenses by categories and total expenses amount were voted as the most useful, and usually seen as a one graph.
Outcomes
This project successfully delivered a new dashboard helping users understand how their company is performing and prepare for taxes. 46% of users voted Sales chart contained the most helpful information, as it helped them quickly track their income. If I had more time to work on this project, I would work on drill down functionality to help users quickly dive deeper into their data.
