ImagineTime

Doing your taxes doesn't have to hurt.

In the summer of 2019 Fugitive Labs approached me with an interesting project. Their client had acquired a twenty year old product for accountants, not for product, but for its clients. Fugitive Labs was going to help design and build a modern software for accountants, one that would combine the best of Asana with Slack to create a modern workflow to get work done.  

The team took a lean startup approach from the start, built a minimal viable product and then expanded. I had a week to design version one – I was all in.

Team

Development: Fugitive Labs
Product Design: Myself

Outcomes

The Problem

Working together on a task was painful for both accounts and their clients.

Accounting work is complex and requires constant communication between accountants and their clients. This work can become painful when the work is split over a number of different accounting and communication platforms. Here were some of the opportunities that we had identified: 

  • By having accountants and clients use the same platform to communicate and work on a task we can streamline communication.
  • Creating one place for uploading, reviewing and signing documents would keep work from getting lost.
  • Workflows that don’t change can be transformed into templates so they can be used again and again and reduce unnecessary work.

design Process

When collaboration just works.

Because our client had an original product with a large client list we were fortunate to have reference customers right from the start – our ideal customer that we were targeting with the product.

We had a user base that were excited to begin using our product even at its most raw because of how bad the status quo was.

As a product team was also had a very clear understanding of what good collaboration and workflow oriented software looked like. The product owner and I were in lock step identifying use cases and white boarding the application we needed to design.

We selected the main user stories we would need to build out a functional product and took the best features from Asana, Slack, and Typeform and raced to create an MVP.

The Dashboard

Our first version of the Dashboard used a timeline approach. We quickly learned that this approach would not scale well with accountants that had more complex projects.

Version two economized information density into a list view.

Communication over a task was the main pain point.

How the current process works for most firms is that documents and files are worked on in piecemeal, with the client having very little understanding of how long the process will take and what is required from them. This drags out the job for both sides and is very costly.


Our aim was to streamline task communication as much as possible and give both parties transparency into what the process of collaborating would look like.

We made use of a list view that would be familiar to anyone who has used a modern Saas product.

Design Note:  having too many different UI styles slows down development and makes it harder for users to quickly become familiar with your product. I strove to keep the number of different UI styles to a minimum.
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Task Workflows

Many accountant workflows can be standardized and made into templates. The workflow creation features was one of the core differentiators of our product.

The client

When you're building a two sided platform standardize the UI as much as possible.

With two sided platforms there is a lot of complexity involved. It’s the designer and product owners job to keep the complexity to a minimum in the early stages while the team is small so you can rapidly build out a first version. I tried to keep the design components to a small set to keep us moving forward rapidly.

Only as much design as is needed for each stage.

We found that we needed to differentiate the clients view enough from the accountants to create clarity for the different user groups.

A best practice that I adhere to is to stay away from doing any larger branding or visual design work in the early days for the product.This work is often wasted before you have product market fit and it wastes valuable development cycles.

Sometimes success comes too early.

ImagineTime got acquired less than year in development.

After a successful first build out our client used the early strong signals from their customer base to sell the product. Though the outcome was favorable we were looking forward to swinging for the fences and making ImagineTime the next big saas startup.  We were just getting started.