TL;DR
“Solo by MYOB” is an Android and iOS mobile app that helps sole traders stay on top of business admin work, banking, payments and tax compliance tasks. My participation in the discovery stage was crucial for obtaining the investment needed for development
The app is currently available in the market and streamlines admin work for thousands of sole trader businesses in Australia; but bringing it to life was not an easy feat. Building an app is an expensive and time-consuming initiative that requires intensive scrutiny and creative discovery work to increase overall confidence.
My main contributions to this project included:
- Design leadership: Shaping the product and design direction
- Stakeholder engagement: Leading customer-focused discussions with stakeholders.
- Design methodology decisions: Choosing appropriate design methods.
- Conducting research, analysis, and prototyping.
Context
“Solo by MYOB” is an Android and iOS mobile app that helps sole traders stay on top of business admin work, banking, payments and tax compliance tasks.
The project started in 2018, when MYOB questioned why people were choosing competitor’s products over theirs. After many rounds of research, it was discovered that their products did not work for a particular group of customers, sole traders and freelancers, because the solutions were too complex for their needs.
To work for sole traders, the product would have to be simplified as a mobile experience and the price would have to drop to match their expectations.
Discovery work for a mobile app
I joined the team in 2020, when we started exploring what a mobile app offering should look like. We run five design sprints in a row in partnership with ThoughtWorks to help us understand the customers and their needs, explore solutions and collect customer feedback.
Above is the prototype that I created as a result of all the testing and feedback sessions, and the customer value propositions (CVP) options we tested with customers to get a feeling about how we would market this new product. Both of them were used to share the vision with stakeholders.
We learned a lot of it and we were highly confident that the solution had potential, but it would be too expensive to build an app from scratch with all the necessary features. So, we returned to discovery and redirected our attention to exploring alternative ways of making the existing browser-based product more attractive to sole traders.
Exploring alternative ways for making the existing product more attractive to sole traders
One of my hypotheses was that sole traders perceived the existing browser-based product as too complex for their needs. I believed that changes in the visual appearance, without changing the back-end, would be a cost-effective way of making it more inviting. So, I tested the hypothesis with customers and confirmed that the product indeed was perceived as something that it was not “for them”. You can check the result of my research below, on the left.
This gave me confidence to start exploring more variations of the existing product using more colours, illustrations and white space. The goal was to investigate the level of complexity required for changes to the current product. Research results on the right.
The explorations were hitting the mark with potential customers, with some of them even asking when it would be available for them to use. However, as a result of the tech analysis, our team came to the conclusion that it would be necessary to drastically simplify the existing product. On top of that, our research pointed out that a browser-based product alone, without a mobile app, would not be enough to attract customers. The return on investment would not pay off.
Creating and validating personas
In the meantime, we noticed in our customer research sessions that some groups of sole traders had particular needs. So I worked with a design researcher to interview and prepare personas to help us better direct the product and design conversations. The image below is the summary of the study.
After that, I requested a quantitative study from the market research team to validate the personas and measure their proportion in the market. This provided us with a clearer understanding of the audience size and guided us in shaping not only the product, but also marketing and communication strategies. Below is a slide of the market research.
Discovery work for a mobile app solution with banking
The mobile app solution came back to the conversation with a fresh perspective because incorporating banking capabilities to the offering could potentialy justify the return on investment. So, we ran a couple of design sprint sessions with one of Australia's major banks to explore how we could work together, bringing banking and business admin solutions into one single offering.
The final result was a consolidation of all the learnings from our previous years of explorations and studies, and this new exciting and promising partnership. I created the prototype below to illustrate the product to stakeholders and for tech estimation.
Outcomes
I moved to another project at the start of 2023 but, soon after, the team secured investment and the business had a major internal restructure to support the development of the app. A year later, the product was launched, consolidating and simplifying admin work for thousands of Australian sole trader businesses.
I’m very proud of the extensive discovery work done by our team, which has contributed to the product's current success. Our customer-centric approach and dedicated efforts formed the foundation for a meaningful product that solves real-life challenges.