Xero is a global cloud-based accounting software business, and its website—Xero.com—is the front door of a rapidly growing technology company meeting the diverse needs of millions of external users (and hundreds of internal ones) all over the world.
Over nine months, we designed a system for the transformation for Xero.com: a complete toolkit that goes beyond visual and interaction design, and into the way teams from five different regions around the world work together to design, deliver and constantly improve beautiful user experiences.
We ran a thorough human-centred design process over the course of a year and a half, collaborating with Xero’s internal design and content teams. We used rapid prototypes to steer user research, and ran generative workshops with stakeholders, designers, technologists and marketers across the business.
Smart, open-minded people who are easy and fun to work with.
Dion Wise
Xero
We took an object-oriented approach to design: each part of Xero.com’s content and design was broken down to distinct building blocks. This means that Xero teams in any part of the world can create local content, design and marketing experiences from those building blocks, while still telling one consistent global story.
We created a custom operating model: ‘NISR’ (needs, information, structure and representation) that decouples each part of the experience from the others, leveraging the full capability of Xero’s technology (including Adobe Experience Manager). This took us from digital design to organisation design, mapping workflows, structures, roles and responsibilities.
Xero.com had inconsistent quality across its 10,000 pages. Internal teams felt unclear and frustrated about how to improve it. Simply designing a new website wasn’t enough for lasting change. We engaged hundreds of users, internal and external, in a design process reimagining Xero.com from the outside-in.
Including:
The new website has been piloted in Australia, NZ and UK with significant uplift in quality of user experience and commercial effectiveness. New global teams and capabilities have been established to deliver this new experience, with the NISR model embedded and expanded.
In the future, our design system and operating model allow for personalisation to happen in a radically different way for Xero: one-to-one experiences at scale. For a business that does the majority of selling online, this is critical. Based on McKinsey data, this evolution could close a major opportunity gap, leading to an increase in revenue of 15%.