Quickbooks Get Paid Upfront
Integrating discovery points for QuickBooks Get Paid Upfront feature that allows small businesses to get paid when they need it.
About the project
The Problem
Our design team conducted customer interviews to uncover one of our most prevalent customer problems: waiting to get paid. About 67% of our customers have to wait NET terms or longer to get paid on the work they do, which can potentially stall business growth.
QuickBooks wants to assist customers by offering an option to get paid on sent invoices and bypass the conventional NET term waiting period.
How might we create a rich customer experience that builds on top of the product experience that already exists?
The Goals
Create a rich customer experience that enables contextual discovery of Get Paid Upfront, and normalizes the action using this tool as a means to stabilize one's business.
Design Process
Potential Touch Points
After aligning on the customer problem we were solving for (easing the burden of waiting to get paid), we kicked off the design process by auditing our current invoicing flow. We looked at the entry point where customers first learn about invoicing all the way through invoice creation and reconciliation. We mapped out the flow and looked at critical points where a customer could learn about Get Paid Upfront.
Although we saw many opportunities to surface GPU (signified by the green star), we focused our discovery to a few tasteful, intentional places (signified by the orange star). Our goal was to only surface Get Paid Upfront in a contextual way that made sense to the customer versus every chance we could.
Original dashboard data card
During our audit, we looked at the visual journey and aligned that the invoicing story would need to be retold to include Get Paid Upfront. If we wanted to normalize the consideration of using the Get Paid Upfront tool, we would have to re-examine how we talk about invoicing from an end to end perspective.
Original Invoice home page
When customer's land on the invoicing home page, we recognized that a lot of work would have to be done to seamlessly integrate Get Paid Upfront within an experience that our customers had grown accustomed to over the years.
Research
After our end to end audit we moved on to our research phase. Our goal during this phase was to identify where the current experience fell short and how customers responded to Get Paid Upfront. After testing several concepts, customers resoundingly loved the idea of being able to get paid right away and bypass the waiting period. It was also very universal that the critical data customers hungered for dealt with unpaid and overdue invoices. It was perfect synergy for our new product. Our next goal was to iterate on how to effectively apply these learnings and integrate Get Paid Upfront within the invoicing experience.
Step 1: Low fi designs
During sketch phase, it was important to think about the customer's journey end to end. We wanted to tell a cohesive, consistent story from start to finish. This resulted in considering the visual story from the point of initial log in through to navigating to the invoice home page.
We explored several expressions for how the retold invoicing story would include Get Paid upfront.
Step 2: Mid fi designs
We tested several concepts with customers, with different degrees on how we told the integrated Invoicing and Get Paid Upfront story.
Our objective was to uncover how customers understood how their invoices were doing and what actions they could take.
Learnings
Customers wanted to know which invoices were paid, unpaid or overdue, and what they could do about it.
concise
Customers wanted relevant actions to take on invoices that had a critical status of overdue or unpaid.
Actionable
If there was anything critical in terms of fees or deadlines, customers wanted that information surfaced.
transparency
final designs
Through relentless research and data-backed decision making, we aligned on moving towards a new data visualization aimed to simplify some of the info while also surfacing our new tool. We, again, performed another round of testing to validate how our customers understood the data.
Updated dashboard data card
We re-tooled the data card to show data differently and accounted for the main use cases this data card would consider.
Simplify 'Paid' section
Use consistent timeline (year vs month)
Show tactical actions that a customer can take
Before
After
Updated invoice home page
The invoicing home page would need a much larger overhaul since customers have already grown accustomed to it over the years. How do we introduce Get Paid Upfront as a core action that can be done on an invoice?
We chose a few contextual places to surface up info and actions to help teach our customer what and how to use Get Paid Upfront.
Update the data visuals to match the data card to tell a visually cohesive story
Add a status column to let customers know which invoices to use Get Paid Upfront on
Add quick actions to allow easy maintenance of invoices
In order to inform the customer which invoices are eligible for Get Paid Upfront, we added a status column with the labels "Eligible" and "Funded" depending on what the customer has done.
Get Paid Upfront column
To normalize the use of Get Paid Upfront, we added specific actions of "Get advance" and "Manage funded invoice". These terms were thoroughly tested with customers, but there is always room for optimization.
Actions
We continued the story from the data vis card and added more detail within the 'Paid' section. At this point, it made sense to have a deeper breakdown because you are now in the invoicing center, so more information is relevant here.
Data visualization
