Company:
Xero
Role:
Product Designer
Type:
UX design, UI design, Research
Timeline:
November 2024 – February 2025
Xero Inventory is a key component of Xero’s platform, but its limited and inflexible functionality didn’t fully meet users’ needs. Our goal was to improve adoption while preparing inventory for Xero’s AI-driven future.
Xero has historically been a poor product fit for goods-based businesses, resulting in weak performance in this market and a CSAT score of just 32%—significantly lower than Xero’s average. Specifically, inventory…
13% of off boarding comments mentioned Inventory as a key driving factor in why users were leaving Xero.
Our accounting partners often voice that they are unable to sell Xero to their clients as it is "unsuitable for anyone with inventory needs"
Out of the over 4 million active organizations in Xero, less than 10% use inventory with only around 5% actively using inventory features
I was tasked with diving deeper into the problem to understand the core issues and suggest improvements that would enhance overall inventory usage and help the business unlock this market.
I started by trying to understand the problem at a high level. Through community forums, we identified common themes of efficiency, automation, and insights.
I also conducted a competitor analysis, comparing feature sets and inventory offerings to identify areas where Xero was not competitive. A few key points were:
Xero lacks most inventory management features beyond basic goods reception.
Competitors offer significantly better inventory organization features.
While Xero provides reporting, the absence of management and filtering options makes inventory reports vague and overly high-level.
There is a general lack of automation, presenting a major opportunity for AI integration.
Xero is a highly complex platform, with many businesses adapting it to fit their needs. We aimed to better understand these intricate workflows and explore the key themes in greater detail. As part of this, I flew to Melbourne to speak with experienced accountants and small business owners to gain insights into their workflows and use cases. Some of the common pain points observed were:
Although Xero offered the basics, its system was very rigid and lacked the flexibility and advanced features needed by many businesses.
"It’s time consuming and simply doesn’t work for a lot of business"
Many common workflows are highly manual, and while Xero has significant potential for automation, we currently don’t offer any.
"I don’t undertand why we (business owners) need to do all this, it waste a lot of time"
Our inventory provides very little in terms of insights, meaning users must rely on third-party apps for more detailed reports and analysis.
"Many of them (business owners) aren’t the most business savy so insights would be great"
Managing a large inventory of items or services can be challenging for businesses. The lack of organization leads to inefficiencies, such as time-consuming manual tasks and UX issues like the inability to group or categorize items.
"Often times its the last thing I want to do, it honestly takes way too long"
While users can access high-level insights, they lack deeper insights, such as identifying top-performing products or those underperforming. This forces them to be reactive rather than strategic, ultimately hindering their growth.
"we need to assess how every part of the business is performing"
As part of this work, we designed with AI in mind. Xero is launching a new feature called JAX (Just Ask Xero), an AI agent that accesses business data and leverages various Xero features as its "tools" to complete tasks. After collaborating with the AI team to refine our inventory tool and ensure seamless integration with JAX, we found that for JAX to perform key inventory tasks, it required specific data fields—some of which we already had, while others were missing. These included:
Inventory touches multiple points within Xero and impacts various workflows. We mapped out user flows and identified points of impact on other workstreams to collaborate effectively and understand their use cases, helping us determine what we could and couldn’t do.
Our vision is for JAX to be your inventory agent—managing stock levels, providing insights, and suggesting actions to grow your business. However, since many vital data links are missing, part of this work involved designing the best way to connect and unlock AI for inventory.
Soultion to have minimal impact our other worflows and allow for xero’s flexibity in use
Unlock AI for inventory
Increae tracked invnetory use in the ANZ market by 10%
Increase CSAT score by 1 pont
Implemented new fields for categorization and default supplier selection using Xero’s contact database. These enhancements improve filtering, streamline management, and enable better insights and automation.
Displaying high-level insights directly on the inventory page improves discoverability and helps users consistently track their business's status.
Integrating JAX directly into the inventory page will automate tasks, provide insights, and display real-time updates and changes.
Not every business owner fully understands the power of Xero’s reporting. Developing a series of templates will simplify the process and make insights more accessible.
Using Loveable, I created a basic prototype for moderated and unmoderated testing. Initially, we experimented with V0 but chose Loveable due to its potential for backend integration to emulate AI features. We are now expanding this by integrating the GPT API to simulate JAX’s functionality, allowing us to gain insights into how non-AI users prompt and interact.
We tested our early Figma concepts with the community and internal Xero users, gaining confidence that our solution effectively addresses key challenges in inventory organization and insight generation.
Phase 1 of the design has entered a closed beta, and we are closely monitoring user feedback and adoption.
Cross-Functional Impact
Although we mapped out the impact, Xero's complexity makes it essential to continuously monitor how this feature is used and the effects it has.
API and Integrations
Xero Inventory integrates with many ecosystem solutions, with API compatibility as a key strength, enabling further expansion and support.