Xero.com

Redesigning Xero.com

In partnership with Xero

Yesterday

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.

We were engaged to design 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 nine months, 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.

There was inconsistent quality across the 10,000 pages on the existing website. 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.

Our process resulted in:

A vision and design principles describing Xero.com’s fundamental aims
A digital identity bridging the gap between marketing and product experiences
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
A modular design system, meeting the highest levels of accessibility, tested with users all over the world
A digital playbook guiding Xero’s website team to deliver great experiences

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%.