Morgara - dashboard experience
Designing an accounting dashboard for a SAAS startup from the ground up.
Mogara is a YCombinator (‘23) backed SAAS startup that provides automated cost capitalization for software companies.
My objective was to design an intuitive dashboard interface that would help accounting and engineering teams streamline the reporting of their software research and development costs.
SKILLS
User research & testing
Wireframing
Prototyping
High fidelity designs
Figma
THE PROBLEM
Our surveys revealed the painful cost capitalization process
New 2022 tax code requires all software companies to capitalize software expenses. After surveying accounting and engineering teams, it was clear that the current process was a headache.
A few specific issues with the current process:
01 It requires manual self-reporting, usually through google sheets
02 The collection process allows for a lot of last minute guesswork and indefensible data
03 Real quote: “I personally chased people down hallways to get them to fill out a Google Sheet (with their time estimates)...it was quite painful.”
How might we make cost capitalization accounting more efficient and intuitive?
RESEARCH & INSIGHTS
Exploring customer insights and necessary functionality
Mogara’s backend automates the cost capitalization process. My objective was to design an interface that supported users by making the automated reporting outputs more intuitive and efficient.
After interviewing the accounting and engineering teams at 4 late-stage growth companies, I performed market research and built out a user persona to understand our customer and their mindset:
-
While the cost capitalization process is a collaborative, cross functional effort, the main Mogara user is an accounting controller at a growth company.
Profile: Controller Caroline is an experienced and busy manager.
Pain points: Converting manual surveys into reporting, Chasing peers for manual inputs
Need & goals: Wants to “set it and forget it”, Wants easy formatting that fits into existing reporting nomenclature
-
Accounting teams at these companies are familiar with existing accounting software like Quickbooks or Xero.
Due to the extensive functionality needed for accounting, the UI for their dashboards is clean and professional. A lot of their pages are referential to spreadsheet formatting and have export to csv functionality.
-
I then led an affinity mapping brainstorm with the product and engineering lead to sort through table stakes functionality and screens:
Necessary functionality & treatments: add a manual edit, export to csv, add linked issues, add new project, date sorting/filtering, notifications, status changes
Necessary pages: dashboard homepage that acts as project roll up, specific project page
Key insights to inform our design:
01 The design should be accessible and intuititive across job functions (accounting & engineering teams)
02 The designs should be referential of existing accounting spreadsheet formatting
FINDING A SOLUTION
Bandwidth & engineering constraints, testing and iterating
Armed with all our discoveries and brainstorm, I sketched out a few dashboard concepts to review with the team. I ended up with 3 concepts around how to best organize projects for easy and intuitive use:
After deciding on a tab treatment for project organization, I worked closely with the lead engineer to simplify the experience based on time and bandwidth constraints.
Furthermore, we tested the high fidelity wireframes with 4 prospective users and implemented a few changes to our final dashboards given their feedback:
01 More prominent editing functionality for linking issues
02 The simplification (and removal) of a few items: notifications, status bar, export functionality
03 The addition of a side panel for added flexibility in adding functionality as the product grows
