Enhancing User Experience Through Collaborative Design Workshops: A Pennylane Case Study

3 May 2023       .      3 min read

Introduction

In the ever-evolving world of technology, businesses must prioritize user experience (UX) in their digital products. At Pennylane, our accounting platform is designed to make financial management seamless for our users. We recently conducted design workshops with our product designers to ensure the platform's continuous improvement. This article will take you through our journey of identifying user issues, evaluating existing features, and implementing a UX improvement plan that ultimately significantly enhances our platform's navigation.

Problem Statement

One of the primary issues we identified was that users needed help finding what they were looking for within the platform. Based on feedback and the high volume of inquiries received by our customer care team, it was evident that our navigation system needed a major overhaul. In addition, the lack of clarity was causing frustration among our users, which negatively impacted their overall experience with our accounting platform.

Suggested Solution

To address this issue, we embarked on a comprehensive process that began with a heuristic evaluation and a complete UX audit. This allowed us to thoroughly examine the platform and synthesize our findings into a UX improvement list. We then conducted user interviews and testing sessions better to understand our users' needs and pain points. Finally, with this valuable information, we suggested new solutions to enhance the platform's navigation. One of these solutions involved conducting card sort testing on Maze, a UX testing platform, ensuring our proposed changes would not break the existing user experience but rather enhance it.

Obstacles and Breakthrough

As with any redesign process, we faced several challenges along the way. The first was to ensure that our proposed solutions aligned with the needs of both our users and our product and development teams. We tackled this by fostering a collaborative environment that kept the user at the top of the priority list. We created a solution that met everyone's requirements by working closely with all parties involved. Another challenge was the need to balance an intuitive navigation system and a clean, uncluttered interface. We overcame this by adopting a user-centric approach, prioritizing the needs of our users above all else. This allowed us to design a platform navigation system that was both user-friendly and aesthetically pleasing.

Conclusion

The collaborative design workshops with Pennylane's product designers were instrumental in identifying and addressing the user issues in our accounting platform. As a result, we created a more intuitive and user-friendly navigation system by conducting a thorough UX audit, engaging users in interviews and testing, and working closely with our product and development teams. The improved user experience benefits our existing users and helps attract new customers to our platform, ultimately contributing to Pennylane's continued success in the competitive world of accounting software. The positive impact of these changes was evident in the reduced number of support tickets related to finding features and the significant decrease in time-on-task rates for specific tasks. These improvements demonstrated that our efforts were indeed on the right track. While we acknowledge that this is just the first step in an ongoing journey of continuous enhancement, we are confident in our ability to make further refinements to our platform and provide the best possible experience for our users. The lessons learned from this process will continue to guide our future endeavors as we strive for user experience and satisfaction excellence.