New Design for Reckon One!

Kelly

Hi Everyone! 👋

We’re excited to share that our design system, Balance, has been introduced to Reckon One - starting with the navigation and colours! 🥳 We’d love to wave a magic wand 🪄 and have it apply everywhere, but that will mean spending less time on building the features you need to support you as you run your business, and so we’ll be doing a slow roll-out on the design. We’ve been researching with customers as we’ve slowly rolled this out, hearing and applying feedback, and will continue to do so.

The key customer challenges we’ve focused on addressing include:

1. Maximising screen space: We’ve heard you need more room to focus on your tasks, like raising invoices and processing pay runs. We asked ourselves how we could optimise screen layouts to give you a cleaner, more efficient workspace.
2. Outdated system design: You’ve told us that our system is starting to feel a bit dated. We asked ourselves how we could modernise and improve usability so you can more efficiently complete your bookkeeping tasks.
3. More instructional content: We understand that learning a new product, and undertaking bookkeeping tasks infrequently can be challenging. We looked at how we could provide clear and effective instructional resources to help you spend less time on training and more time getting tasks done.
4. Navigating between Payroll and Reckon One: We know it can be confusing and time-consuming to navigate between two different domains. We looked at how we could make the transition between our products smoother and more intuitive. Read the feature release note on how we addressed this.

After deep diving into customer feedback, we developed solutions to address these key issues and tested them with a group of customers, gathering valuable insights and refining our approach. This process led to the integration of our Balance design system into Reckon One, which not only enhances the usability of our products but also allows us to implement changes more quickly and efficiently.

👀 Keep reading to find out how we solved these key challenges!

✨ So, what’s a design system?

A design system is, at it’s core, a design language. It’s the building blocks of components and patterns, allowing us to apply a consistent design language as we work. For example, a table, or a button, are examples of components - they look and operate the same way, across pages. We don’t need to consider all aspects of the design of these components each time we use them, and customers don’t need to learn how to use components every time they view a different screen. This approach, at it’s heart, allows us to focus on solving the customer problem at hand, conduct research to better understand requirements, deliver consistent experiences for customers, and scale quickly - so we can deliver features faster.

We’re excited to introduce you to Balance, and how it is giving Reckon One a modern and fresh look:

🎨 New colour scheme

Reckon’s branding is bold, which we really wanted to bring into Reckon One. You’ll see our colour scheme of red, purple, and blue - or, grapefruit, blackcurrant and blueberry, as we like to envision scenes of summery picnics when using them - is used to highlight navigation, buttons, and messaging. Our background colours are used subtly, so as to not distract you from the important tasks you are doing - whilst the action buttons have a bold splash, helping you find the next step quickly and easily.

🚀 More space to allow you to focus on what’s important

Space is premium! We’ve heard you loud and clear, and so we’ve:

1. made the side menus collapsable, so you can hide them when you want to maximise the working space on a page. When you’re ready to navigate to another section, you can either click to expand the menu again, or hover over the menu icons to surface a mini-menu.
2. consolidated the most frequent ‘create’ actions in a “Quick add” menu option on the top navigation, allowing you to quickly jump to tasks. This works for adding new pay runs, employees, invoices, bills, expenses, timesheets and more!
3. created a stronger vertical hierarchy, which is easier on the eye - instead of a cluttered screen, we’ve grouped similar content and given more space on a page, leading to better readability and focus on the main task. You’ll see this in Payroll, soon in Invoices, and features developed from here on out
4. redesigned some key tasks to allow you more working space, such as Payroll’s pay runs screens, which we split into two steps. This is to surface the maximum amount of room to edit a pay run.

✏️ More instructional content

Bookkeeping and setting up your book can be complex tasks, especially if you aren’t a bookkeeper! To that end, we’re adding in more helpful content into our screens, to help you understand what’s needed for a task. We speak with the Support team regularly, understanding what our customers are asking about, particularly the “how do I…?” questions. Information is available to you not only in help articles on our Help site, or via videos on our Youtube playlist; but we’re also working on getting information to you contextually in Reckon One, when and where you need it. This includes improving error messages, to help you recover from issues quicker. There is a LOT of content in Reckon One, so there’s a lot for us to get to - but just know that it’s top of mind for us, and we’ve been steadily adding more instructional and up-to-date content where you need it.

🗣️ What do you think?

Our design system, Balance, is always evolving, as our priority is to enable the system to flex to meet the needs of our customers as they use Reckon One. Let us know what you think of our design changes - and if you’d like to research with us (and get paid to contribute your opinions!) then keep reading 😄

💰 Get Paid to do research with us!

If you’re interested in sharing your thoughts on future features and products, and our design system, join our Reckon research panel! We run a variety of research studies, including usability studies, interviews, surveys, and more.

We host our research activities on UserTesting, a research platform, which enables us to easily pay you for your time with each Reckon study you participate in. UserTesting incentivises via your PayPal account, from USD5* for a short 5 min study, to USD60* for an hour interview.

Create an account, answer some Reckon profile questions, and then look out for emails from UserTesting to join a study. Completing your Reckon profile ensures you are only contacted for studies you are eligible for, making them relevant to you. Join now!

 

*UserTesting pays in US dollars, which with our exchange rate, is even better for our Aussie/NZ wallets!

Cheers,

Kelly J. - Head of Research & Design, and Andre C. - Lead Product Designer

Eric Murphy

This was an interesting read and nice to get some insight on the decisions that go into developing and designing the software.

ASoC

I am finding the colours for Reckon One very hard to look at, and causing migraines, is there an update coming that will allow to the other colours in the 'Summer picnic' pallet?

Kelly

Hi @ASoC I'm sorry to hear that the new colour palette is causing you pain. I'd like to better understand the contrast issues you're experiencing so we can work on something which will address them (and any others who may be experiencing them too) - I'll reach out to you to organise a session