Redefining Finance, Accounting, and Automation with Qvalia

Overview

Qvalia is a technology company dedicated to helping businesses enhance their transactional data management and automate processes. They offer a comprehensive suite of cloud-based tools designed to automatically structure and interconnect transactional information, providing deeper insights and managing daily tasks such as invoices, approval workflows, sales, and accounting. Played a key role in developing and refining frameworks, significantly improving the robustness and coherence of the overall design system.

Background

In August 2019, I joined Qvalia as the Head of Design. It quickly became apparent that the company’s design framework needed significant enhancement. The scope of the necessary improvements was extensive and initially unclear.

Responsibilities

• Managed all aspects of design within a dynamic fintech environment.
• Formulated and propagated the company’s long-term design strategy, both internally and to external stakeholders.
• Developed and implemented new design systems, principles, and guidelines while advocating for robust design processes.
• Acted as a hands-on designer, actively participating in daily design-related tasks.
• Recruited, led, and mentored a new in-house design team, built from scratch.

Initial Assessment

• Conducted a thorough audit of existing design elements.
• Organised and analysed screenshots to identify disparities and commonalities.
• Evaluated current solutions and practices for effectiveness and adherence to user-centered design principles.
• Highlighted areas lacking clear processes, guidelines, or documentation.

Findings

• Significant design inconsistencies such as variable font types, sizes, and colors.
• Reliance on different sources of truth by various teams, leading to discrepancies.
• Numerous processes and user interfaces lacked uniformity, even within the same sections of the platform.
• Major deficiencies in accessibility and usability.
• Inefficient use of resources, with substantial funds spent on external agencies that failed to deliver expected results.
• Misalignment of many solutions with user needs and business goals.
• Excessive focus on non-priority conceptual projects.

Subsequent Actions

• Dismissed all external agencies and contractors, resulting in substantial budget savings.

• Designed and launched a comprehensive design library.

• Led a complete rebranding of the company, encompassing design, marketing, and more.

• Established clear design patterns, processes, and flows.

• Completely revamped the platform’s UX architecture.

• Instituted a structured design process and set firm design principles.

• Created extensive design guidelines and a guideline library.

• Specified deliverables and streamlined the hand-off process.

• Implemented a well-documented, scalable design system, continuously enhancing our knowledge base.

• Initially, I recruited a talented freelance team from abroad, which accelerated our progress, achieving our goals much sooner than planned and at half the initial budget.

• Built an in-house design team from scratch.