Seamless upgrading and downgrading flows

01 Background

Commerce is a new feature that allowed business owners who sell products on sales channels like Amazon or Shopify to manage their inventory in QuickBooks.

Exclusive to Plus and Advanced plan subscribers, this project marks its first release to paying customers, so it was critical to address the following scenarios:

Downgrading: When users switch to lower plans, they lose access to our feature. We must ensure seamless offboarding without data loss or disruptions to their books.
Upgrading: Subscribers on higher plans should have the option to use the new feature, but we needed to build a mechanism for enabling or disabling it.

02 Team

1 x product manager
1 x tech lead
1 x product designer
3 x software engineers

While the core team remained lean, the challenge was working with 6 other teams, scattered across 4 countries.

03 Audit

Since it’s a QuickBooks feature, we didn’t need to start from scratch. Instead, we conducted an in-app audit to understand existing subscription flows.

Audit of existing upgrade/downgrade and other relevant flows in QuickBooks

We didn’t want to deviate significantly from these since users are accustomed to these flows. This approach has an added benefit of reducing development effort.

04 Collaboration

In addition to technical complexities, we had to collaborate efficiently with other teams. To facilitate this, I created flowcharts progressing from plain text to visual user journey maps and wireframes.

Mapping the different flows and sharing to different teams to establish alignment

Low-fidelity wireframes allowed us to iterate quickly

05 Design solutions

Upgrading and enabling inventory tracking

After aligning our approach, ideation began. One focus was enabling higher plan users to access the new feature, requiring a toggle mechanism. Due to a technical limitation, users had to enable the feature for all channels or none, leading us to place the control in Account Settings temporarily.

Though this cut down on engineering work, it posed the challenge of distinguishing it from the existing inventory management feature, prompting exploration of various solutions:

While the ideal state is the first option, we went with third option as we didn’t have enough controls to warrant a separate page yet

Enabling inventory tracking for sales channels

Downgrading and disabling inventory tracking

Another area of focus is around downgrading to lower plans, ensuring that users can get offboarded without losing data and causing unexpected disruptions to their books.

In this flow, we tried to minimize the friction, and focus on the bare minimum that users need to do before moving to their desired plan.

Disabling inventory tracking for sales channels during downgrade

Audit log and email notification

Early on in our discovery research, we recognized a need for businesses with multiple team members to track when inventory tracking is enabled or disabled by others.

To address this, we proposed updating the audit log and sending email notifications to all admin users whenever the toggle is changed.

Updates to audit log and email notification

07 Results

Despite facing technical limitations and navigating cross-geographical collaboration hurdles, we successfully launched the upgrade/downgrade flows on schedule, and the new feature was effectively rolled out to our paying users.

If given the chance I would keep track of:

number of Commerce users who upgrade or downgrade successfully contacting support
support tickets from users who toggled inventory tracking for sales channels on or off

2023 ✴ UX/UI design, User research and testing