Teliti is an online bookkeeping and company secretary website designed to help small business owners. They are a hybrid accounting and company secretary service based in Malaysia where entrepreneurs can outsource their entire back office through a web platform and in-house professionals. The bookkeeping service of the website manages your paperwork, categorizes your transactions and prepares accurate reports for your growing business.
Our stakeholder and primary contact for this project was Adam Leong, the founder and CEO of Teliti.
Currently the app is a client portal in its MVP phase, but Adam wants to offer users more features in the future such as payments to vendors. The first step in the journey is to make the client portal an easy and seamless experience for Teliti users, primarily focusing on the bookkeeping side of the business. This generated two goals for the team:
First-time small business owners based in Malaysia that are ages 25-35.
For our secondary research, the team conducted various analyses of Teliti’s competitors: Osome, Sleek, and Bench. Osome and Sleek are both primarily based in the Asian-market while Bench is primarily in the American market. The goal was to find strategic insights into the features, functions, flows, and feelings evoked by the design solutions of Teliti’s competitors. By understanding these facets of competitors' products, we could pinpoint problems in the current MVP and then strategically design the right solutions making a happy user experience.
We performed a heuristic analysis using Jakob Nielsen's 10 Usability Heuristics for User Interface Design to identify areas of possible improvement ahead of user testing.
We began design and ideation by taking our key findings from research and product audits, and doing an early redesign of Teliti before user testing. Teliti did not have set parameters to identify the brand, so we developed a style guide to create cohesiveness throughout the product. We took inspiration from the foundation set by the branding of Teliti’s website to determine a color palette, typography, iconography, UI elements, logo spacing, and grid spacing and combined that with brand tone set by Teliti’s founder. The result was a brand identity that was friendly and trustworthy.
We also conducted an audit and update of existing user flows. Below is the original user flow that was provided at the start of the project.
The user flow that was received at the start of the project was limited to one portion of the bookkeeping flow that was within our scope: the Parcel Delivery portion. After taking a look at the different elements, we found there were quite a few steps missing, the most notable of these was being able to check the user’s Costs and Sales.
After designing and speaking with the team, we would continue to add more to this flow to better understand the user’s route. Below is the finished user flow after several iterations.
After discussing our research findings and recommendations with Adam, the team dove into creating wireframes and eventually high fidelity mockups of key screens to lay the groundwork before creating the prototype for user testing. Key elements, fonts and colors were implemented from the style guide. While other members of the team were responsible for the visual design, I focused on the various journeys that the user takes and how the product is structured to facilitate this journey. Below are some before and after screens to highlight some of the changes:
For usability testing, we sought out participants that fit within Teliti’s target audience: first-time business owners looking to expand their business, but have minimal knowledge about bookkeeping and accounting. Amber, Winnie, Zach, Kari, and Fiona were asked to first review Teliti’s website and then test the following tasks:
We presented our usability test results, iterations, and recommendations to Teliti’s founder in our final call. He was excited about the work we had done to elevate the user flows and user interface experience of the client portal. The findings of our testing provided a promising foundation as positive notes were that the portal was nice, simple, and easy, as well as opportunities to further develop the dashboard and nuances of allowing users to customize their portal experience.
