ABOUT
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One of the initiatives that the UX team worked on was a UX redesign or "refresh" of the application. I worked as the designated designer for all sections related to billing. In order to make our application more user-friendly, and to be more in line with competitor products, it was determined that the refresh needed to include the ability to create batch invoices in the Advanced Billing section.
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PROCESS
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To create designs, I did competitive research for batch invoicing, primarily using QuickBooks, as well as some other accounting software as inspiration for how to incorporate batch invoices into Filevine. I was able to build out a full interaction, allowing the creation of batch invoices from unbilled items. I went straight to high-fidelity designs, as we had plans to do validation testing with current customers. In hindsight, this was likely a mistake because our validation testing proved that we truly didn't understand our customer's needs.
Our UX researcher, my product owner, and I did validation testing with 5 current customers, walking them through our Batch Billing prototype. We asked probing questions about how they would expect certain interactions to work, what they liked and didn't like, and if they felt this would be a solution to the issues they were currently facing with our product. All customers interviewed mentioned that they didn't see the need for batching certain invoices together in any way, but loved the option to create multiple invoices at once.
Through our validation testing, we realized that creating invoices and grouping them within a batch was not something our customers would need. The majority of the time, the admin in charge of invoices would go into unbilled items and create invoices for anything unbilled. In our product's current state, they had to go project by project and do this 1 by 1. Batching wouldn't solve this problem, and could risk making it harder to find and view particular invoices.
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View Full Batch Billing Prototype below
CHANGING DIRECTION
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My product owner and I decided to pivot, taking the design work I had already done, and scaling it back to become bulk invoicing rather than batch billing. Fortunately, I had already done the majority of the work, and going from batch to bulk was not difficult.
After completing the second round of design work now focused on the bulk action of creating invoices from unbilled items, we had hoped to do another round of validation testing. Unfortunately, we struggled to find willing participants for testing interviews. We tried doing unmoderated testing of the prototype through Maze but still had no response.
RESULT
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Despite the lack of customer feedback, we felt strongly that the new direction addressed the issues raised in our initial testing interviews, and presented it to Filevine's betting table. Following my product owner's presentation, our solution was accepted to go into development. As our development cycles were only 6 weeks, the solution was broken into two sections, first working on the unbilled tab, then moving to the invoices tab in a second cycle.
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View Full Bulk Invoicing Prototype below