2020-2023

Solo by MYOB

Leading design discovery for a new mobile product

TL;DR

Solo by MYOB is an Android and iOS mobile app that helps sole traders stay on top of business admin work, banking, payments and tax compliance tasks. My participation in the discovery stage was crucial for obtaining the investment needed for development.

The app is currently available in the market and streamlines admin work for thousands of sole traders in Australia. But bringing it to life was not an easy feat. Building an app is an expensive and time-consuming initiative that requires intensive scrutiny and creative discovery work to increase overall confidence.

Key contributions

Design leadership

Shaping the product and design direction

Stakeholder engagement

Leading customer-focused discussions

Design methodology decisions

Choosing appropriate design methods

Research and prototyping

Bringing findings to life

Context

The project started in 2018, when MYOB questioned why people were choosing competitor's products over theirs. After many rounds of research, it was discovered that their products did not work well for sole traders and freelancers because the solutions were too complex for their needs.

To work for sole traders, the product would have to be simplified as a mobile experience and the price would have to drop to match their expectations.

Discovery work for a mobile app

I joined the team in 2020, when we started exploring what a mobile app offering should look like. We run five design sprints in a row in partnership with ThoughtWorks to help us understand the customers and their needs, explore solutions and collect customer feedback.

The prototype on the right was a result of all the testing and feedback sessions. I also created the prototypes for the Customer Value Proposition options below that we tested with customers to get a feeling about how we would market this new product. Both of them were used to share the vision with stakeholders.

We learned a lot of from it and we were highly confident that the solution had potential, but it would be too expensive to build an app from scratch with all the necessary features. So, we returned to discovery and redirected our attention to exploring alternative ways of making the existing browser-based product more attractive to sole traders.

Initial prototype

Exploring alternative ways for making the existing product more attractive to soloists

One of my hypotheses was that sole traders perceived the existing browser-based product as too complex for their needs. I believed that changes in the visual appearance, without changing the back-end, could be a cost-effective way of making it more inviting. So, I tested the hypothesis with customers and confirmed that the product indeed was perceived as something that it was not "for them".

This gave me confidence to start exploring more variations of the existing product using more colours, illustrations and white space. The goal was to investigate the level of complexity required for changes to the current product.

The images on the right are excerpts of the studies above. Contact me for more details on my research and results.

The explorations were hitting the mark with potential customers, with some of them even asking when it would be available for them to use. However, as a result of the tech analysis, our team came to the conclusion that this secondary interface would require expensive changes to the existing product. On top of that, our research pointed out that a browser-based product alone, without a mobile app, would not be enough to attract customers. The return on investment would not pay off.

Creating and validating personas

As the project progressed, we noticed in our customer research sessions that some groups of sole traders had particular needs. So I worked with a design researcher to interview and prepare personas to help us better direct the product and design conversations.

After that, I requested a quantitative study from the market research team to validate the personas and measure their proportion in the market. The result was a clearer understanding of the audience size and guided us in shaping not only the product, but also marketing and communication strategies.

Discovery work for a mobile app solution with banking

The mobile app solution came back to the conversation with a fresh perspective because incorporating banking capabilities to the offering could potentially justify the return on investment.

We ran a couple of design sprint sessions with one of Australia's major banks to explore how we could work together, bringing banking and business admin solutions into one single offering.

The final result was a consolidation of all the learnings from our previous years of explorations and studies, and this new exciting and promising partnership. I created the prototype to the right to illustrate the product to stakeholders and for tech estimation. Below is an example of one of the prototype workflows.

MYOB + Banking prototype

Saving receipts

Customer makes a payment and receives a notification instantly.

Transaction is already recorded in the ledger, but can be edited as needed.

Customer takes a picture of the receipt just received.

And saves it, as required by the ATO.

Receipt is saved and transaction is updated in the ledger.

A foundation for growth

I moved to another project at the start of 2023 but, soon after, the team secured investment and the business had a major internal restructure to support the development of the app. A year later, the product was launched, consolidating and simplifying admin work for thousands of Australian sole traders.

I'm very proud of the extensive discovery work done by our team, which has contributed to the product's current success.

Our customer-centric approach and dedicated efforts formed the foundation for a meaningful product that solves real-life challenges.

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