May 2018: How FreshBooks persuaded its customers to accept radical change

How do you persuade your customers to try your new product when they’re already pretty happy with what they’ve got? How do you get them to migrate to a new product that, technically, has fewer features? How do you overcome the dreaded “switching cost,” the pain of learning something completely new?

In this talk, Aaron Wright and Jeff Kraemer will detail how they researched migration experiences (which are usually terrible), explored UX designs using a lean UX process, and ultimately launched a migration experience that lives up to FreshBooks’ mantra: “Execute extraordinary experiences every day.”

In 2014, FreshBooks launched an ambitious, secret project to reinvent itself—a complete redesign and rebuilding of its flagship product, a cloud accounting application used by over five million people. The old product was saddled with both technical and UX debt, and we just weren’t able to deliver what our customers needed quickly enough.

After two years of testing and iterating in weekly UX sprints, we were confident that the new product was a much better experience for users. But: it had fewer features. And the first thing we learned when we asked customers what they expected from a new FreshBooks was “more features!”

So, we had a challenge: we needed to persuade our customers to leave a product they generally loved, move to a new one with fewer features, and avoid making it another awful migration experience.

We’ll explain how we researched and designed that experience, list some lessons we learned, and offer key takeaways for anyone planning to introduce their users to a radical change.

Bios:

Aaron Wright:

I stumbled into the field of UX while pursuing a degree in Graphic Design at York University. Originally just trying hone my web design and app-building skills, I soon learned that there was, in fact, an entire field devoted to the study of user experience itself and immediately changed focus. And I haven’t looked back. I’m now a UX Designer at FreshBooks since 2012, livin’ the dream of taming complexity and trying to make boring work (like accounting) as close to fun as humanly possible.

Jeff Kraemer:

I ran my first usability test back in 2001; this was before screen-recording software, so recording the test meant pointing a VHS videocamera at the screen. Since then, I’ve spent time specializing in content strategy and instructional design, but I really love being a UX generalist. Previously at Workopolis and Usability Matters, I am now Principal UX Designer at FreshBooks.

Please register for this free event

Thursday May 24, 2018
5:30pm to 7:00pm
3rd Floor Theatre, Roddenberry, Communitech
151 Charles Street West
Kitchener, Ontario

Pizza and drinks will be served at the event.