Overview
One of the initiatives the UX team worked on was a redesign and "refresh" of the application. I worked as the designated designer for all sections related to billing.
In order to make the application more user-friendly and more competitive, it was determined that the refresh needed to include the ability to create batch invoices in the Advanced Billing section. What followed was a lesson in letting research drive direction — even when it means changing course midway.
Process
To create designs, I did competitive research for batch invoicing, primarily using QuickBooks as well as other accounting software as inspiration for how to incorporate batch invoices into Filevine.
I was able to build out a full interaction, allowing the creation of batch invoices from unbilled items. I went straight to high-fidelity designs, as we had plans to do validation testing with current customers.
"In hindsight, going straight to high-fidelity was likely a mistake — our validation testing proved we didn't truly understand our customers' needs."
Validation Testing
Our UX researcher, product owner, and I did validation testing with 5 current customers, walking them through our Batch Billing prototype. We asked probing questions about how they would expect certain interactions to work, what they liked and didn't like, and whether this would solve the issues they were currently facing.
All five customers interviewed mentioned that they didn't see the need for grouping invoices together in a batch — but they loved the option to create multiple invoices at once.
Through testing, we realized that creating invoices and grouping them within a batch was not something customers would need. The majority of the time, the admin in charge of invoices would go into unbilled items and create invoices for anything unbilled. In the product's current state, they had to go project by project and do this one by one. Batching wouldn't solve this problem, and could risk making it harder to find and view particular invoices.
5
Customers interviewed in validation testing
0
Customers who needed batch grouping
5/5
Customers who wanted bulk creation
Changing Direction
My product owner and I decided to pivot — taking the design work I had already done and scaling it back from batch billing to bulk invoicing. Fortunately, I had already done the majority of the work, and making the transition wasn't difficult.
After completing the second round of design work focused on the bulk action of creating invoices from unbilled items, we hoped to do another round of validation testing. Unfortunately, we struggled to find willing participants for testing interviews. We tried unmoderated testing through Maze, but received no response.
Solution
The final design enabled admins to navigate to unbilled items and create invoices for all unbilled entries across projects in a single bulk action — eliminating the need to go project by project.
Rather than grouping invoices into a named batch (which customers didn't need), the solution focused on speed and simplicity: select all, create invoices, done.
Result
Despite the lack of a second round of customer feedback, we felt strongly that the new direction addressed the issues raised in our initial testing interviews. We presented it to Filevine's betting table, where the solution was accepted to go into development.
Given Filevine's 6-week development cycles, the solution was broken into two phases: first building out the unbilled tab, then moving to the invoices tab in a second cycle.
✓
Accepted at the betting table
2
Development cycles to ship
6wk
Per development cycle