Clique Advisor

Building a task management tool that allows accountants to create a roadmap for their clients and their businesses.

Duration:
January 2020 - Present

Background

Personal finance is daunting, even with an accountant there’s always things to be done.

Even if you have a dedicated accountant, personal finance can be very daunting – there’s always things to be done, especially if you’re a small business owner. And accountants have a plethora of action items for their clients, this can get especially complex when they also manage the books for those small businesses.

Clique Advisor addresses this issue by helping accountants build a personal finance roadmap for their clients, tailoring it to their specific financial goals.

challenge

The existing product was complicated and unintuitive, Clique wanted to do better.

The team at Clique had a preexisting skeleton of a product but were eager to build v2. They had received many complaints regarding the complexity of the application, and felt the experience was unintuitive.

These challenges were exacerbated by the lack of responsive behaviour and letting accessibility fall to the wayside while building out their initial concept.

Role

I worked with my partner Sean Fitzmartin, a fellow designer, three Engineers from Clique’s team and the founder of Clique.

Solution

We built a task management tool that allows accountants to define and assign tasks for their clients. And a companion mobile app that allows clients to view their tasks and liaise with their accountants.

User & business needs

We bridged user needs to Clique’s business needs

With the problem space defined we conducted research by speaking to nine Clique users about the challenges they encountered using the app. We also synced with the founder to discuss their product priorities.

Challenge 1

Clarity of Information
The manner in which accounting advice was presented was too complex and overwhelming leaving users confused. Many users also felt that the key action item was unclear.

Opportunity
Create guidelines for how advice can be digestible and actionable to ensure its something clients can follow through upon.

Challenge 2

Difficulty Discovering Content
Accessing certain key pages was rather difficult due to the way the site was structured. This meant that both accountants and clients often missed key pieces of info.

Opportunity
For accountants the methodology for assigning tasks to users was unintuitive. And on the other side of the equation users also had challenges finding tasks assigned to them.

Challenge 3

Poor onboarding experience
The onboarding process was on Clique was critical to ensure accountants had the requisite information to support users. However, in its existing state it was a mess, leaving accountants with half-filled user profiles. This was especially an issue from a business lens, as it meant accountants were not gaining nearly enough value from the tool.

Opportunity
Create an onboarding process that was quick, effective, and enjoyable was critical to ensure accountants could add all their clients in a manner which ensured both parties could maximize the value of Clique.

Defining the Solution

We created a sitemap that clearly defined the relationship between the various facets of the application and helped us clarify the IA of Clique. This gave us a much better understanding of the existing navigation issues and allowed us to simplify the journey.

From there we transitioned from wireframes to a high fidelity interactive Figma prototype for user testing with three of our previous interviewees and for handoff for Clique’s development team.