The walkthrough
61.7 seconds. Captions are included in the film. Made with Nolan from an editable screenplay running in a real browser.
What the requester said
“Can we have the ability to search for a transaction , by amount , payee or description across all bank accounts. Rather than having to go into each bank account and sort dates etc and than search.”
Verbatim from the Xero Product Ideas board. Reproduced as a contiguous extract and checked against the harvested record.
Key moments
- Search across every bank account the current user can access.
- Label every result with its account.
- State when permissions limit the search scope.
What we concluded
Needs a different solution
Search every account the current user can access and identify the account for each result.
The interface should also make any permission limits clear.
Why we reached that conclusion
Searching across bank accounts would help people find a transaction without opening each account in turn. The prototype changes two parts of the original request to keep the results useful and safe.
First, the search has to respect the current user's permissions. If inaccessible accounts are silently omitted, an empty result could be mistaken for proof that the transaction does not exist.
Second, cross-account results should not appear as ordinary matches inside Find & Match. A result from another account needs to identify its account clearly and should take the user there rather than posting the reconciliation to the account currently open.
In the walkthrough example, the search covers six of eight accounts available to the organisation. The prototype labels every result with its account and states that two accounts are excluded by the user's role.
Whether to name inaccessible accounts or only report their number remains an open permission and usability question. The important point is that the search scope should be visible.