Introduction

The mobile project this consisted of the redesign for the AutoEntry App. A recently acquired company of Sage. We where tasked with a rebranding the mobile app, this also gave us an opportunity to update some key pinpoints and improve some features. With the rebrand update Users where also getting some very useful feature updates. The app itself is a simple product. You snap images of receipts, invoices and expenses. These are broken into 3 separate folders Purchases, Sales and Expenses. The core of the product is Purchases and Sales. The product is aimed at SME and Sole Traders, Bookkeepers and Accountants. How it works. You Open the app take a snap of receipt and then it is processed with OCR. Data is attracted and can be connected to Tax software products such as Sage for Accountants.

Concepts + Ideation

We wanted to update the structure of the product to allow our Users to upload receipts in a frictionless manner, or as frictionless as possible. In theory the product is simple, but like many other apps there is always edge cases and pitfalls.
We decided to change the previous placement of the what we call the switcher. The “switcher” allows Users to change between folders of a company and for mutli-company Users they can switch between companies and folders alike. (You can see the Before and Afters of the product below)
Another item on the landing page (For single company Users it was generally the Purchases page) was the key interaction of the app. The “Add” button. Originally it was a circular button with little identification on it. We updated this to give it more prominence. The idea was to create a place on screen of consistency, we called this area the action bar. So on the bottom of the page where lots of apps have navigations bars. We decided to use this area for a single or multiple action. In the case of purchases page, it would read “Add a Receipt”. Making it clear and obvious to the User. We also move the switcher from the top of the screen to just above the action bar. This was to help reassure the User that they where added to the correct folder.

Key Goals

• Simplified Upload Process
• Chunk Information of more complex process (Splitting of Expenses)
• Restructure of primary pages/folders. (Purchases, Sales, Expenses)
• Clarity in language of primary interactions. (Add buttons and action buttons)
• We then simplified our camera function.

Learning + Outcomes

During this project we tested some of work we real world Users who where actively using the current / previous version of the product.

Below you can see some tests that where carried out by our UX research Team. For the tests we created an A and B version of the mobile camera - upload process. We asked are participants in complete 3 tasks on both versions. Users where prompted to speak aloud whilst completing each task. Much to our surprise we found that the process where we prompted our Users with Actions Sheet (IOS Version) in selecting the upload method (Camera or Gallery). Rather than the more flexible/generic version with the Image icon in the bottom left side of the screen. Our Users preferred the more handheld process. The takeaways from this where that our Users felt more comfortable with some friction as it meant they had to decide what method they wanted to upload items in as a first step. We used this thinking to help simplify the rest of the process. Although there might be more steps from the previous version. We have received positive feedback from our Users that claim that the product has more clarity.

We found that in the alternative version which we gave more flexibility to the User to make adjustments(changing mode from single to multi-item upload or combined) after the Image was taken or item was selected from the gallery was not perceived as helpful.