Project Summary

The Project

Our goal was to create a new application that scheduled payments and maintained customer mandates in Quickbooks. This application acts as a middle application that syncs with Quickbooks and the GoCardless product dashboard via APIs.

My Role

With a Solutions Engineer and a third-party development team, I lead the design by:

• Creating user flow diagrams that described the connection between the marketplace application, Quickbooks, and GoCardless dashboard.

• Designing a prototype that displayed the use of the marketplace application.

• Maintain brand consistency by using our Flux component library.

• Collaborating with multiple designers on copy, logo, and application behaviour.

My Approach

I used several products including Synder and GC4X to understand what product we wanted to build and how it would behave. I created assets such as user flow diagrams, a prototype, and developer documentation to help instruct the development team on what to build and how information syncs across products. When the product was built, I ran a quality assessment that ensured that the product was built to spec. Finally, I embedded analytics into the product so that we can track our users and support future improvement plans.

The User: Quickbooks merchants

Wants to:

• Send and receive invoices that accept direct debit payments.

• Set up customer mandates so they can accept automatic payments withdrawn directly from a customer’s bank account.

• Reduce payment failures and identify payment fraud.

"It would be great to be able to accept [direct debit] payments in different currencies so I can expand my business."

Competitor Product

I looked at a similar product, Synder, in order to understand how interactions with the application impact the Quickbooks application.

Understanding where in the Quickbooks product information changed and updated would inform the Solutions Engineer and our development team on where to embed the GoCardless dashboard and Marketplace App API webhooks.

For example: If the merchant creates and sends an invoice in Synder, how does Quickbooks update?

Defining user stories

I collected user stories from the statement of work contract that GoCardless sends to Partners who build a full feature, GoCardless integration in their product.

For example: “The Partner could enable merchants to collect payments from different currencies than their home/default currency” translated to “A merchant can collect payments from different currencies than their home/default currency.”

Creating User Flows

From the user stories, I collaborated with the Solutions Engineer to create user flows of how Quickbooks, the Marketplace app, and the GoCardless dashboard synced information across the products.

This piece helped our development team understand how information syncs throughout the products and display the user experience of each user story. The developers used this information to embed webhooks into Quickbooks.

GoCardless wants to create more of these applications for our Partners, so I created a white labeled template using interfaces from our Sales demos.

Developer Documentation

I created developer documentation of the different conditions and states for the product’s tables. This would allow our developers to understand the complexity of the interaction and develop the assets and tables accordingly.

Quality Assessment

I collaborated with our third-party development team, Satva, to ensure that the interfaces would meet our specs. At the end of building the application, I set up a QA process that helped the development team understand what changes they needed to make.

Data and Analytics

I worked with our Business Intelligence team to embed Google Analytics into the product so that we can track our users.

These analytics would be used to monitor the health of our product, paying attention to the number of users and their locations. This would be used for further strategic business planning, where we plan on what regions to expand integration builds into next.

Thank you!

We launched the Quickbooks Marketplace Application in Australia, France, and in the US where Quickbooks did not have a GoCardless integration in their product. The Partnerships team handed off the application to our Connect team who is responsible for supporting and maintaining the applications, websites, and APIs that support our Partners.