About the Project
QuickBooks is a suite of products aimed at helping small and medium size companies organize their business. As part of the time tracking segment, my focus was to help customers manage and track their team’s work using the QuickBooks Time product.
Tracking work and paying your team extends beyond employees. As market conditions continue to evolve, it has become increasingly important to improve workflows involving contractors. This project focused on optimizing the experience for capturing contractor time for QuickBooks customers.
My Role
As the lead designer on this project, my responsibilities included problem space definition, customer research, prototyping, interaction definition, final design specifications, and rollout planning.
Cross-functional team: Product manager, data analyst, UX researcher, content designer, and software engineers
Goals
Formerly known as TSheets before the 2018 acquisition, QuickBooks Time’s integration with QuickBooks presented unique challenges in this problem space. Regular feedback from customers indicated improvements were needed for both our basic time users and premium time tracking users, each with its own set of problems.
⌚︎ Enable contractor time tracking for basic time users
⌚︎ Allow premium users to track time just for contractors (versus all vendors)
⌚︎ Resolve backend complexities related to syncing data
⌚︎ Optimize downstream workflows for contractor time
Fun fact
In QuickBooks, vendors are any outside suppliers that companies do business with. This can range from purchasing parts from Home Depot to hiring Joe Smith to knock out a side project. Most vendors never perform hourly work for a business. Contractors, which are defined by their “1099 payment” status, are a subset of vendors and represent a cohort of vendors that are much more likely to need to track hours.
The Problem
Basic time tracking
• Can’t enter time for contractors
• Can’t invite contractors to track their own time
• Can’t easily add contractor time to a bill in order to pay them
“I would love to be able to receive hours from my contractors, generate a bill to pay them for their hours, and then add their billable time to my invoices. Right now…the timesheet feature is completely unusable.”
Premium time tracking
• Time interface is cluttered with irrelevant vendors and employees imported from QuickBooks
• Unclear if the team member tracking time is an employee or contractor
• Can’t easily add contractor time to a bill in order to pay them
“The ability to import selective vendors and employees from QBs would be much better as it creates a big cluster in the TSheets account.”
The Process
Customer Research
To ensure we correctly identify the problem space, I partnered with research to conduct customer interviews to understand their top pain points related to contractor time tracking. I also collected feedback and customer sentiment through existing channels such as UserVoice.
Top Insight
If our product doesn't solve well for contractors, the entire product becomes useless. No one wants to use one time tracking solution for employees and another time tracking solution for contractors.
Expert Sessions
Not wanting to overlook the wealth of knowledge from our internal teams, I conducted expert sessions with Sales and Customer Care to collect their feedback and uncover what they regularly hear from customers.
Current state evaluation
You can't know where you need to go until you know where you are. I find that a thorough evaluation of current state helps deepen product knowledge, discover additional use cases and error states, and aids in the brainstorming process down the road.
Success Definition
I worked with the cross-functional team to identify an ideal state and the metrics we would use to measure success. We decided to use feature adoption and PRS as indicators of success as we worked toward our ideal state.
Ideal State
In a perfect world, users can invite anyone on their team to track time, including contractors, without cluttering their accounts with unnecessary data. This time can then easily be used in relevant downstream workflows.
Backend Complexity Resolution
Given the nature of our backend, we were essentially working on an integration between two products (QuickBooks and QuickBooks Time) despite the product appearing to be singular. I worked closely with our developers to identify technical challenges that impacted the user’s experience. I used basic flow diagrams to illustrate the problems and generate a shared understanding.
Top Hurdle
Our biggest challenge involved misaligned data requirements when syncing contractors between the two platforms. We landed on a solution that resolved the issue through clever parsing of data resulting in no additional cognitive load for users.
Dependency Identification
As just one of many QuickBooks business units, we inevitably encountered dependencies on other working teams. I worked with my product manager to identify these dependencies and determine where we could gain alignment and shared prioritization with other teams.
Prototypes and Design Specs
Using Figma, I prototyped and defined specifications for our proposed solutions to further ensure alignment and to collect additional feedback. We also used these artifacts to break the work down into well-defined stories for development.
Solution
Phased Approach
Given the complexity of our system, and the significant dependency on other teams, we decided to take a phased approach. This allowed us to reduce the scope of work in order to bring value to our users more quickly while we generated buy-in from other teams.
1. Unblock time tracking for contractors
2. Add controls to reduce unnecessary time trackers
3. Enable contractor invites (deprioritized)
4. Use time to automate contractor payments (deprioritized)
Basic Time Solution
Basic time users can now enter time for their contractors and select which contractors and employees track time.
• Added setting to allow users to choose contractors as time trackers
• Improved filters and labels to differentiate between employees and contractors and to choose who tracks time
• Created pathways to discover contractor time tracking (not yet released)
Discovery
Contractor setting
Premium time solution
The basic time solution outlined above was also valuable for premium time users so we rolled the experience out to both audiences. In addition, we increased discoverability of this setting inside the classic QuickBooks Time interface since that's where most premium users spend their time. This new setting was particularly imperative for premium users due to the clutter that was caused by the current "sync all vendors" setting.
Discovery
Results
As of July 2022, we’ve seen significant adoption of the new settings, particularly among premium time users, with 90% of these users switching from syncing vendors to syncing only contractors. As discovery improvements are made, we expect to see increased adoption from basic time users as well.