The walkthrough
68.1 seconds. Captions are included in the film. Made with Nolan from an editable screenplay running in a real browser.
What the requester said
“Ability to include more information that’s unique to customers/business/industry that assist the transaction and relationship between customers”
Verbatim from the Xero Product Ideas board. Reproduced as a contiguous extract and checked against the harvested record.
Key moments
- Add contact and invoice fields to the editor.
- Carry those fields into the document the customer receives.
- Test what happens as more fields are added to the invoice header.
What we concluded
Has wider trade-offs
Custom fields are useful only if the customer can see them.
That means designing the editor, PDFs, and branding themes together.
Why we reached that conclusion
Custom fields could help organisations carry important customer or job information onto invoices. The prototype showed that adding fields to the editor is only one part of the feature.
The fields need to appear in the final document. The stated purpose is customer-facing, so each supported PDF or branding template would need a way to place and style the new values. Otherwise the editor would show information that the customer never receives.
The invoice header needs limits. Custom fields can multiply quickly. In our prototype, six fields pushed the line-item grid below the fold at 1280 × 720, making an already busy screen longer.
Contact-level fields that flow onto invoices are already part of the submitted idea, so there is no substantially simpler version to recommend. The customer-facing templates and layout rules belong in the scope from the beginning.