Wolters Kluwer & Twinfield
Project Overview
As a Senior User Experience Designer at Twinfield, the leading bookkeeping software in the Netherlands (later renamed Wolters Kluwer Tax & Accounting), I joined a dynamic five-person design team. Over two and a half years, I contributed to several impactful projects, helping to shape the future of bookkeeping and accounting software. These projects included:
- Twinfield Renovation: A full redesign and migration of the UI from Angular to React, incorporating tactical innovations.
- PSD2 Integration: Connecting banking services to the accounting domain.
- Design System: Collaborating with the Center of Excellence (CoE) to develop a design system for consistent UX across products.
- Twinfield Collaboration: Creating a platform where accountants and clients could share tasks, including an iOS app.
- Wolters Kluwer Cloud ID: Unifying user accounts across multiple products.
Building Customer Connections
When I joined the team, user research was not a regular part of the design process. We could only engage with customers through a sales representative or product owner, which limited direct feedback. Understanding how vital user input is for effective design, I took the initiative to create a channel that connected our design team directly with customers.
To accomplish this, I redesigned the existing marketing questionnaire, adding an opt-in mechanism for user studies. I also accessed the CRM portal to identify potential study participants. With some friction along the way, especially concerning GDPR compliance, we eventually created the first user database for Wolters Kluwer Tax & Accounting (WK TAA) in both the Netherlands and the UK. This database became a blueprint for other business units across the organization, transforming how we approached user studies.
Postponing a Release to Ensure Quality
One notable achievement was stopping the premature release of WK Cloud ID, an internally developed feature. There was significant business pressure to push it live, but after conducting a heuristic evaluation, I identified major gaps in the authentication, authorization, and accounting (AAA) flows within Twinfield. I turned these insights into a gap analysis that convinced the product manager to conduct a user study before the release.
Within a week, we conducted a usability study using the new user pool, even finding edge-case participants outside the Netherlands. The study results, shared through presentations and video clips, highlighted critical improvement areas. During a PI meeting (under the SAFe framework, which I hate), the product manager and I raised the red flag, which led to the release being postponed by two months. This extra time allowed us to address the most pressing UX and UI issues, ensuring a smoother product launch.
Contributing to Design Systems & Hackathons
Design Systems were becoming a crucial part of the UX landscape, and I contributed to the development of Twinfield’s design system, focusing on components like tooltips and charts. I collaborated with the CoE team, participating in workshops to align design efforts across business units.
I also embraced the creative energy of hackathons. My team won two coding game hackathons, where one of my more unconventional approaches involved recruiting a back-end developer with a six-pack of beer—thankfully, it didn’t count as a bribe! One of our winning projects was Blackline, a solution that censored confidential information, and another focused on reducing churn by providing customer consultants with Next Best Actions (NBA).
and the second is about reducing churn and providing the next best actions (NBA) for customer consultants.
New Product Development: Twinfield Collaboration
I also played a key role in the development of Twinfield Collaboration, later rebranded as Twinfield Start. This platform fostered collaboration between accounting firms and their clients, integrating financial data sharing and task management. The platform’s innovation extended Twinfield’s core services by adding analysis and insights modules to help accountants detect anomalies and share valuable business insights.
Driving Design Sprints for Rapid Innovation
To address critical assumptions quickly, I introduced design sprints to the team. While I don’t believe design sprints are a one-size-fits-all solution for innovation, they proved highly effective in clearing up key assumptions within a week. I facilitated several sprints for projects such as PSD2 (Payment Service Directive 2) and Automation in Accounting (AI/ML-based).
Reflection
My time at Twinfield was marked by collaboration with highly skilled colleagues, though the company culture initially felt more domestic, with meetings often held in Dutch. However, as the company transitioned to WK TAA, it became more international, which allowed my efforts and contributions to shine on a larger scale. This experience taught me the importance of inclusion and diversity in driving creative and effective design outcomes.
Date
2017-2018
