Financial Statement Suite V7
Delivering a refresh to 360,000 daily active users.
Financial Statement Suite (FSS) was designed to automate the testing of long financial statements, saving auditors hours of work. It quickly became a staple of DataSnipper.
In 2024 it was proposed to decouple it from the Excel plugin, thus giving it an opportunity to expand; adding testing capabilities, remote updates, shared workspaces and more.
This is the story of how we delivered the new Financial Statement Suite.
- PM
- EM
- 6 Engineers
Collaborator (with design partner), moved into Lead Designer position.
6 Months
The Human Problem
Users greeted with FSS for the first time found it confusing, distracting and complex. An over-abundance of information thrown at them all to fast with little to guidance.
The Business Problem
With feature requests comes the challenge of finding a way to fit them into an existing product interface. FSS had reached a crux in itās evolution.
šÆ
Redesign Financial Statement Suite for future growth, sustainability and new users.
Where we startedā¦
Financial Statement Suite already has a very established userbase, the last thing we wanted to do was disrupt them.
We took the time to do our research and develop our focus areas, whilst reviewing the areas we were not to touch.
- Clear division of information
- Primary focus is document
- Evidence reasoning clearly indicated
- Navigation is getting stuffy
- Export not highlighted
- Wasted space from scroll bars and menus
Solutions & Ideating
Navigating Growth
The current tab system had to go. We needed to adopt a modern UX pattern for navigating, this is the introduction of the sidebar.
By freeing up this top bar, we allowed for more height in the PDF viewer and slimming the tools. Research told us that tests would be recognisable by just initials. Additional features (Overview & Checklist) would be icons to separate their functions.
Versioning was hidden behind a sidebar. Users wanted a quick way to create, delete and compare versions.
Introducing Project Overview, a simple way for users to understand their progress in checking tickmarks.
Collaboration
A Financial Statement can go through hundreds of reviews before being signed off. Collaboration features had been slowly added, but users wanted more.
Markup tools allow for common identifiers to be drawn on the PDF. Commenting is improved with focused information density, alongside threads, flagging and resolving comments.
Reducing the amount of floating windows a user has to manage was key. Markup is sticky to the bottom of the window, whilst commenting is an expandable drawer (as well as pinnable).
Comments become easily identifiable, clickable targets. Find the information where they need it.
Highlight, strikeout, direct and more with Markup capabilities. Just like the old days.
Final Checks
With the capabilities of AI, there was a clear desire from users to use the technology for first review of disclosure checklists. The addition of this test allows for users to proceed through AI-generated suggestions of evidence and action the answers accordingly. Each suggestions is referenced and viewable from the sidebar to the pdf viewer.
This design follows the footsteps of DocuMine, introducing references, actionable answers and full control left to the user.
66% of the way there? Each Suggestion is editable to find the perfect evidence to the question. Remove, create, tweak as you please.
22 / 25
Of participants were able to find and perform every task(6) asked faster than original design.
100%
Of participants from research preferred the new interface. A majority of positive comments and surprise.
FSS V7 is in full production with a full roll out due late 2025.
- Itās all about laying the groundwork with the team. Theyād been stagnant for too long, showing them a vision gave them the much needed boost of energy.
- Handover is key. When another designer left the team, I spent weeks trawling their files to understand where the project was. A lot was reproduced from scratch.