2019 | Lead Designer | Contract at Wolters KluwerWolters Kluwer make professional tax and accounting software. They’d long been the industry standard, but were losing market share. They needed a fresh start and a roadmap for the future.
Background
Wolters Kluwer’s ageing software suite still had loyal customers, but sales were dwindling, the product had grown large and cumbersome, and the team were not sure how customers used it or what they valued .
Work had begun on a web-based replacement, but the replacement product lacked a clear vision for what it would become, and what problems it was solving.
I joined a new, two-person design team on a six-month contract, tasked with establishing the product vision and persuading others of the important role design could play in keeping the product suite on a successful path.
Work & Outcomes
I focused my efforts in four areas:
User research discovery, conducted on-site with customer firms. This allowed us to establish user archetypes, workflows and behaviours for different roles in tax and accountancy firms. It also helped us benchmark how well the existing product was performing and identify opportunities to improve.
Providing immediate value on live projects by running user testing, heuristic analysis and designing improvements, including a redesign of a long-standing problem area: user onboarding. This built trust with product managers and developers.
Crafting an inspiring product vision for the future with a clear story behind it for stakeholders to follow. I showed how strengths and weaknesses identified in discovery led clearly to proposed product changes and a new design.
Training up product managers and developers in discovery, user-centric requirements, ideation /design thinking and how to work with designers. This started to shift the team culture towards one of empathy, owning user issues and knowing how to begin tackling them.
