Reckon creates cloud-based accounting applications for bookkeepers, small to medium businesses, accountants, and personal users. The rapid development of their latest generation software had resulted in a design system which had numerous issues.
To supplement the existing research a series of interviews were initiated with members of the design team, development team, stakeholders, support staff, and users to better understand their problems.
Two archetypes were developed that were a reflection of the two main user groups that interact with our design system.
we had a good understanding of the problems we faced and who they were impacting.
Working with stakeholders, a roadmap was proposed to address these issues. One which left available capacity for the design system team to support the product team in creating any component or pattern updates required for any other initiatives.
PHASE 1
Quick actions were required to give relief to the design and development teams while addressing critical user experience issues.
Proper governance of the design system needed to be established. A full process for new components or variables was created with the design and development team.
Data entry plays a vital role within Reckon's product suite. A review and update of the form UI/UX aimed to address user pain points and improve overall experience of our products.
PHASE 2
In this initiative the main goal was to fix Balance’s broken theming layer that was impacting our scalability. Other anticipated benefits were improvements in alignment with design and code, efficiency, accessibility, and experience.
In the initial creation of Balance, Reckon’s branding was completely overlooked. This lead to user feedback that expressed their confusion in our products.
I worked with the Marketing team during a major brand update to ensure that the colours were accessible and to restyle Balance with this updated aesthetic.
Changes to some components and templates were made to better match the overall aesthetic of the brand. This included removing excess dividers, rounding corners, and a redesign of Balance’s typestack.
PHASE 3
Our new brand updates, colour system, were all implemented as Design Tokens in order to facilitate a centralised ‘source of truth’ of all style values across all platforms.
With the completion of the theming initiative the newly evolved Balance was finally ready to launch.
The improvements to Balance have been a massive success that has seen:
Moving into the future we plan to create a more robust documentation platform to help ensure consistency, and further increase efficiency of our team.
