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Xero Me


Working with the Business Products team at Xero I helped to develop this large scale, future facing, employee focussed initiative. This wide-ranging project spanned multiple areas of the business and encompassed customer research, narrative building, conceptual design, the creation of a new visual language for mobile, interaction design, usability testing and detailed design.


Role
Responsibilities

Design Lead
Research
Conceptual design
Storyboarding
UX design
UI design
Art direction
Usability testing
Animation






The Opportunity

Xero were looking to expand deeper into the employee management space, a move which had general buy-in within the business, and some solid high-level strategy completed, however they were looking for help in bringing the vision to life, communicating it more widely throughout the business, and building out a holistic digital experience across multiple touchpoints for both employees and employers. 





The Approach 

We first sought to understand how wide the reach could potentially be, and what parts of the business and existing products would be impacted. We did this by sketching out key flows for both employees and employers and mapping those back to exisiting parts of the Xero ecosystem that would be affected, as well as identifying new areas of focus that also needed to be considered. Creating these lo-fi flows, alongside key customer journeys and rich storyboards which clearly and concisely visualised key parts of the experience allowed stakeholders to really understand the project from an experience perspective for the first time, and helped us to generate excitement within the product teams for what the future might hold.




Multiple rounds of in-depth customer research were also conducted in order to understand needs, goals and painpoints of both employees and employers. The outcomes of this research went on to form the basis of our conceptual design phase. Concepts were robustly tested with users, then refined and were also regularly socialised with key stakeholders and product teams in order to gain alignment and buy-in for the experience we were creating.

Along with creating a holistic experience across multiple touchpoints such as web and native app, another key component of this project was creating a more welcoming, approachable and consumer-focussed visual language that felt modern and more aligned to the digital experiences our key customer base of employees would be using outside of work. Opening up the interface, using bold colors and more thoughtful typography treatments, along with illustrations and meaningful but fun animations were some of the key ways this was achieved.







The Outcome

This initiative very quickly became a key focus for Xero, with multiple teams being spun up in order to focus on the many different aspects of the experience. The initial, mobile app portion of the project is live and subsequent releases will see more parts of this complex puzzle come to market over the coming months and years.


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